


Some Day, the True Story

by mia_ugly



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Boys Kissing, Eventual Happy Ending, F/F, M/M, Pre and Post Reichenbach, Reichenbach Feels, Romance, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Underage Substance Use, Way behind the times
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-29
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-03-26 06:53:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 47,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3841279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mia_ugly/pseuds/mia_ugly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Afterward, after everything goes to shit, John Watson will take the whole sad story apart in his head, cut it open like an apple and keep the good parts.</p><p>(The Reichenbach high school AU I never knew I needed.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Kickdrum Heart

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this years and years ago, after Reichenbach broke my heart and no one was writing high school AU's about it! The world has since moved on, a million superior stories have been written, and I have finally found the nerve to give this fic a bit of light and water. It is a high school AU but everyone will be over eighteen when physical stuff happens. Basically finished, but I'll be posting in chapters as I edit. Thanks to my amazing beta LL, and Fast9's for never getting too tired to talk Sherlock with me over wine and more wine.

Afterward, after everything goes to shit, John Watson will take the whole sad story apart in his head, cut it open like an apple and keep the good parts.

It’s what the psychologist tells him to do, and it isn’t difficult.   There were a lot of good parts, really there were (once you got over the whole “Jesus Christ, we were almost killed back there, Sherlock, I’m going to murder you in your bloody sleep –“).   Looking back, it’s easy to start to think of it all as some marvelous bloody adventure, a never-ending kick drum rhythm, late nights and loud music and Sherlock bloody Holmes.

The good parts were so good.

It’s just that the bad parts were so bad.

For awhile, it’s impossible to avoid. John’s mum takes them all on a trip to the country, and John cuts himself off from the internet, doesn’t look at any of the bloody newspapers, cocoons himself in layers of cotton and willful ignorance, but still there’s the nightly news and obsessive text messages from friends (“Hey, wasn’t that _your_ school?”)  And he’s felt grief, he’s felt sorrow before (just like he’s felt love), and he thought he knew what it all meant, thought emotions were things that he could contain, held tight in his cupped hands. 

And then he met Sherlock.   And everything spilled over.

Anyway the psychologist, right, that’s what we’re talking about.  She isn’t really that bad, as these things go – soft-hearted, middle-aged, nodding with sympathy in time to John’s pulse (dead dad, dead friend, poor _poor_ John Watson).   She tells him to write things down, his favourite memories, good days, bad days.   What she doesn’t know is that John’s been writing it down for two years now, everything, since he walked into an overlarge high school and into the life of a certain beautiful maniac and things just – started happening.  The first night on a case together, the beach and the police and John’s frantically beating heart; he came home and sat down and had a story to tell. 

The ending was a bit fucked.  It can’t always be helped.

He’s glad Sherlock never got his hands on the notebooks. To begin with, he’d be outraged that John was keeping records of their various, not entirely legal, extracurriculars – page upon incriminating page of meticulously documented evidence against them (“Unacceptable,” Sherlock says, a soft baritone, before John forces the voice from his mind.).  More than that – well – it took John awhile to realize that some of his descriptions of Sherlock, Sherlock’s mind, Sherlock’s laugh, Sherlock’s – well, they got a bit carried away.  Even in the early days, even before John -

He’s just glad Sherlock never saw the notebooks.

Now after class at uni, John sits at his desk and stares at blank pages, white and untouched as the first snow of winter. He goes to the library, goes to coffee shops.  He tries park benches.

He stands in front of his bathroom mirror and says “You’re gone,” with the thin, bitten lips he inherited from his mother, and still his pages are empty.

John Watson has no more stories to tell.

Christ, this is bleak, isn’t it?  The good parts, then: Tupper Secondary, Biology 11 (he’s late, which is his first mistake.)

There are five hundred kids in his year, the school is bigger than any high school he’s ever even seen (it has a bell tower, a bloody _bell tower_ ) even the ones in crap American rom-coms.  There’s Bio Lab 221 but there’s also Bio Lab 221B and because John doesn’t want to risk pulling out the sodding map and looking like a tourist in front of his new classmates, he doesn’t realize this until it’s quarter past nine and he’s fucked. He eventually tracks the class down, ducking his head into the room and slouching into the first empty desk he sees. 

Unfortunately, the teacher is one of those ‘let’s be friends’ type of blokes, and John is fucked once again.

“John Watson, right?” Mr. Stamford looks at his attendance sheet.  “Let’s try to be on time from now on, okay?  Just for fun, to see how it feels.”

John mumbles and nods, trying his best to be invisible.

“You’re new here, aren’t you?” Stamford continues, oblivious to John’s very determined wish to die.  “How are you finding things so far?”

“It’s fine, cheers –“ John replies somewhere in the negative decibel region, and then wants to kick himself for saying ‘cheers’ right off – it will be ‘bloody hell’ next, like he’s some walking British stereotype, Jesus Christ –

“Everyone treating you all right?”

“Yeah, cheers –” Fuck’s sake, John.   “Um - very tidy, and um –”

“Well, you’ll need a lab partner.  Hands up, who doesn’t have a partner yet?”

No one raises a hand, and Stamford sighs. “Sherlock, I know for a fact that you don’t have a partner.”   

There is silence, before a few snide murmurs and giggles fill the class, sweeping across the desks like a mean and petty ghost. John lifts his eyes from his desk, seeking out the object of this amusement (maybe a bit curious what the offspring of parents cruel enough to name their kid Sherlock would look like).

“Sherlock Holmes,” Stamford says, “put it away or I’ll take it away.”

John follows Stamford’s glare across the room, where a tall, pale boy sits hunched in his desk, rapidly typing into an iPhone. He has ridiculously messy dark hair, and he rolls his eyes at Stamford, but still tucks the phone into his backpack.   The class all seems to be sharing an inside joke at his expense, and John feels something like dread in the pit of his stomach.  Sherlock Holmes: not an ideal lab partner then (he’s learning the ropes of this enormous bloody school, and that’s all he can hope for.).

Sherlock does not look over to see who his new lab partner is, and John turns his attention to the thirty-year-old textbook he’s meant to be learning something from.  Luckily for him, Stamford is the trial-by-fire sort, and it hasn’t been ten minutes before there’s a dead frog pinned down in front of John, and a skinny boy in a black pea-coat is dragging his desk over.

“Hey,” John says, trying to be friendly in spite of the cruel and curious glances his classmates keep shooting him, “I’m John, I don’t think we’ve actually –“

“Herefordshire,” Sherlock says, sprawling into his desk and peering over the frog.

It takes John a minute to respond.

“Um – what?”

“Herefordshire.” Sherlock has picked up one of the scalpels, and is twirling it gently and alarmingly in his hands. “I’m not wrong.”

It could be a question, but it isn’t, not really.

“No, you’re – you’re not.  I’m sorry, did someone tell you about me?”

Sherlock sniffs, dismissively.  “Of course not.  Who would tell me about _you_? No, I figured it out. It wasn’t difficult.”

John takes another minute.  He glances down at himself, then back at the strange, grey-eyed boy sitting next to him.  Convinced that he didn’t accidentally wear his “I Heart Herefordshire” shirt (he doesn’t actually own one of those, settle down) he pins Sherlock Holmes in what he hopes is an even, don’t-bullshit-me gaze.

“And how did you figure this out – exactly?”

Sherlock hesitates briefly (John will later recognize this for the dramatic effect that it is.).

“Curious expression – ‘tidy’ – but not the more common definition meaning ‘neat’ – no, ‘tidy’ – acceptable, friendly, forthright – an idiom of Herefordshire, England.  Well, you have the British accent, it makes sense, but this particular use of the word is an old one – that would say your family’s been in the area for years, generations even, and you picked up the saying from your parents who picked it up from theirs.  So – deep roots in the community, and yet here you are on the other side of the world.”

“Um – “ John doesn’t really have the words. “Yeah, that’s right. My mom moved us when –“

“You don’t need to tell me.  We’ve a frog to dissect, and anyway, I already know the basics.”

John isn’t sure whether he should be impressed or annoyed.  He settles for a mixture of the two, and it won’t be the last time he does.

“So tell me then,” he says, a bit of a dare in his voice, “since you know everything.”

“Everything?”  Sherlock really is alarmingly pale, scalpel flashing silver between his long, white fingers. 

John shrugs, and Sherlock’s lips twitch, the ghost of a smile.

“Your running shoes – expensive, but an older style – about three years, I think.  They aren’t worn out, so you’re an athlete, but you don’t play much anymore, which says injury.  When you walk, you favour your left leg – you’ve covered well, it’s almost imperceptible, but not gone, never gone.  How am I doing so far?”

John feels a sudden twinge of pain in his right leg, but does not flinch.  Sherlock takes his silence as a gold bloody star, and continues.

“You’ve still got the accent, still got the shoes, so you obviously just moved here recently.  We’ve established the source of your accent, placing you in the vicinity of Herefordshire.  And what does one do there?  Agriculture or military, most likely – you don’t have the complexion of someone who’s spent much time out of doors, so odds are good for military. Can’t be cheap, moving a family across the ocean, so you’ve obviously come into some money and recently. Uprooting a military family after generations, something significant must have happened, a reason for a clean break, or a tragedy –“

Sherlock stops as abruptly as if he’d had his throat cut.  He’s looking at John with an expression John cannot place.  John wets his lips.

“Right,” he manages after a moment. “Um.  It was a tragedy, for the record.”

Behind his eyelids, John sees his dad, tanned and smiling in the photos from Kabul.  Against his skin, John feels the weight of the military tags he wears under his jumper, paper-thin metal but still heavy.

Sherlock doesn’t say anything.  He distractedly pokes the frog with the dull end of the scalpel.

“I’m – um –“

“One hundred percent correct.”  John pushes the images from his mind. “Really.  That was – brilliant.”

“Oh.”  Sherlock looks genuinely shocked.  “Well.  Amateur stuff.”

John laughs, and again Sherlock seems as surprised as if he’s been struck by a car.

“That’s funny?” he asks, and John has no idea how to answer.  

“Yeah, it’s – like, you think it’s simple and I could never figure this stuff out in my wildest dreams, and you’re like ‘amateur stuff.’ It’s just – it’s funny.”

“Oh.” Sherlock looks inexplicably pleased. “It’s a female frog, by the way.”

“What?”

“The first question on the board – the sex of the frog. It’s female.  Males of the species have an enlarged thumb pad.”

“Genius.  Cheers.”  John writes it down in his notebook.  When he looks up again, he finds Sherlock staring at him. 

“What?”

Sherlock keeps staring.  “It’s not what most people say.”

“I’m sorry?“

“Brilliant.  Genius.”

“Oh.  What do must people say?”

“Go fuck yourself.”  Sherlock says this much louder than necessary, and from across the class, Stamford raises his eyebrows almost to his receding hairline.

“Mr. Holmes!”

“I was quoting verbatim,” Sherlock tells him, turning back to the frog, and John can’t help but laugh, low and breathless, and after a moment, Sherlock chuckles too – an embarrassed, choked-back kind of laugh, but for some reason John finds it contagious, terrifyingly so, and he presses his knuckles against his mouth but it doesn’t help, and neither he or Sherlock can look at each other for a good five minutes.

Later on, he will think back on this as one of the good parts, and he will ignore the strange electricity that hummed in the pit of his stomach, a low and pulsing song picked out on a bass guitar.

“Something particularly amusing about your frog, boys?” Stamford calls from across the class, and John has to bite down on the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning, and he will think back on this as one of the good parts, but really it’s the moment that everything went to hell.

*            *            *

There are two parts to this story, the part about football and the part about his dad, and this is the part about his dad.

His dad takes John and his sister to their first football match when John is eleven (Harry is thirteen, and frankly unimpressed. She keeps her headphones on for the entirety, Violent Femmes blasting.). It’s Hereford United at Edgar Street, and the stands are packed with men and women and children all dressed in white, and John thinks for a brief, mad moment that it’s like a wedding, this, everyone gleaming white like snow, like lightning.  He tells his dad, and his dad grins and buys him crisps and soggy chips in tinfoil, and John thinks he must be the coolest kid in the world, hanging out with his dad like they’re best mates or something, not father and son at all, but friends. 

After that game, John starts playing football. It makes his dad happy and it’s fun, anyway, just kicking the ball around with the kids from school, no big deal.  But then, suddenly, he’s playing every night until it gets dark, and one of his dad’s mates calls him 'bloody Beckham' and he tries out for the school team and he bloody well makes it.  Months go by, and John doesn’t slow down, just keeps climbing; kids start looking at him differently in the hall – he isn’t the same, stocky, quiet boy, he’s a footballer, and total strangers hit him on the shoulder, “Hey, well done,” and John can’t help but think that maybe this is the beginning of something.

The same year, his dad ships out to Afghanistan. John can’t really remember how it all goes down, just remembers being with his mom and Harry at the airport, and Harry crying like her heart was broken.  He and his mom were all right, stiff upper lip and all that, but it’s Harry that still gets to him, to this day – falling to her knees in Departures, covering her face with her hands (after they get home, he finds dozens of broken blood vessels underneath her blue eyes, scattered on her pale skin like freckles.). 

John writes his dad letters saying “come home soon”. He writes his dad that he loves him.  When he doesn’t know what to say, when he can’t possibly think of something, he talks about the Lilywhites, beating Scarborough, beating Telford, arses kicked by Doncaster.

Sometimes his dad writes back.  Sometimes he calls, or sends pictures, and Harry won’t even look at them.

John gets into secondary school playing centre midfield on the junior team, and suddenly girls are smiling at him and blokes are clapping him on the back and things are accelerating rapidly – his feet on the field, his eyes on the ball, the ball in the net (his mum and Harry whooping in the stands like the world’s been lit on fire). He’s twelve years old, and he knows he’s not going to be the next Alan Shearer or anything, but he thinks he could play this game for the rest of his life and love it, bloody love it.

John’s thirteen years old, watching the game at his mate Ciaran’s house; he’s not really supposed to be out so late into the evening, but his mum seems to turn a blind eye when it’s about football, and Ciaran’s mum is friends with his mum, so it’s usually okay.  Purdie’s just scored for the Lilywhites, and John and Ciaran are on their feet, dancing like maniacs around the television.

Ciaran’s mum comes in, phone clutched tightly in her hand.  Her knuckles are white, John thinks, slow and far away as if the thought is coming from under the sea.

“It’s your mum on the phone.  You have to go home, love,” she says, and Ciaran glares at her.

“It’s almost over, really, just four minutes of –“

“You have to go home, John,” Ciaran’s mum says again, and John knows, he _knows_ and he doesn’t even say goodbye, he just gets up and goes out the door (halfway to his house when he realizes he doesn’t have his trainers or his coat).

About a block away, he realizes that he can hear a siren in the distance, something high-pitched and wailing.  When he is two flats away, he realizes the sound is Harry screaming. 

He doesn’t go inside. 

Instead, John stands on the pavement looking in, socks soaking wet against the damp ground.  If he doesn’t go in, he thinks, it won’t have happened.  No one will try to hug him, no one will put their hand reassuringly on his shoulder, no one will start a sentence with “I’m so sorry,” none of that shite.   He stands outside in the rain, and his fingers grow long and sprout leaves, his feet put down roots.  He stretches and goes cold and hard and steady.  There, in the street outside his house, John Watson turns into an tree, and that’s what his mum finds thirty minutes later when she’s leaving to go look for him – not a boy anymore, but wood.

There are two parts of this story, the part about football and the part about his dad, and this is the part about football.

When John gets back to school, he’s made of wood, but he keeps playing.  Well, ‘playing’ is such a childish word – John _works_ at football, now, works tirelessly and with a singular focus.   He doesn’t laugh and chat with his teammates; instead, he does an extra lap around the green, sprints with heavy limbs that don’t get cold and don’t get tired.  He makes the senior team in Year 10, and suddenly teachers are talking to him about the future, about uni and scholarships, and he doesn’t have a heart that beats anymore, but he wears his dad’s tags under his uniform at every game, and every game he gets farther and farther away from the sport he used to love, like a child disappearing deeper into a forest.

Try as he might, he can’t for the life of him see the way back. 

Mid-game he finds himself pressing a hand against his chest, just to feel the cold weight of his dad’s tags, remind himself that they’re still close to his skin.  He presses a hand against his chest when he kicks out for the ball at the same time as the kid from Dulwich, and presses a hand against his chest as his world whites out with pain, blood roaring in his ears, and he clutches those tags in the back of the ambulance, clutches them all the way to the hospital where the doctor tells him he’s fractured his leg, and he’s completely and utterly fucked, full fucking stop, and still John doesn’t let go.

*            *            *

The bell goes after that first class, and Sherlock gets up from his desk and strides out of the classroom without so much as a backward glance.  John ignores the pathetic ‘I’ve made a friend’ that flutters and dies in the pit of his stomach, and leaves it at that.

A few days later, John sits by himself in the cafeteria – most of the kids are still eating lunch outside, so the cafeteria is pretty quiet.  He’s content to have a silent and invisible half hour until a pretty girl with dark hair, vaguely familiar, appears in front of him.  She leans on the table, smirking.

“Um – hello,” John says.

“Sally,” she says, “You’re John, right? I’m in Bio and English with you.”

“Cool.”  John tries to be casual, but he can already feel his tongue swelling up in his mouth, threatening to choke him.

“You’re from England?”

“Yeah, I – uh – just moved here, actually.”

“How do you like the rain?  Guess you’re used to it.”

“A bit, yeah.”

There is a silence, while John thinks of how hard he’d have to bash his head on the table to knock himself unconscious. Sally is better looking that most of the girls that have ever spoken to him, and it makes his hands go clammy.

“I just came over here to tell you I’m sorry,” Sally says, “about the whole Bio thing.  It’s like, as soon as everyone needs a partner there’s, like, this rule that you partner up with who the hell ever, just so you don’t have to be with him.”

“Him?”

“Yeah, um, Sherlock Holmes?  The guy that you – anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.  He’s, like, batshit insane, or like a meth addict or something – I don’t know. A psychopath.”

“Um.  Wow, really?”

“Yeah.  Totally gross.  In Grade Nine he, like, OD’d or something in the chem lab, and the cops had to come. I don’t know what his deal is, but just – um – just watch yourself, okay?”

“He seemed all right –“

“Well, he would, he’s like – it’s all fake, though, it’s a lie.  So just – be careful.”

John nods, dumbly and Sally smiles, turning back to rejoin her friends.  John eats the rest of his lunch in silence, occupied by the rapid-fire monologue in his brain (drug-addicted psychopathic lab partner, well done John, way to start the new term).

Two weeks pass like breathing – actually, like the opposite, like something slow and lonely and painfully awkward _without any friends_ , not like breathing at all. John sees Sherlock in class, but they don’t have any projects together (though they get full marks on the dead frog assignment).  John can’t really think of a reason to start a conversation that wouldn’t be beyond awkward (“Sally says you’re a psychopath.  How about that local sports team?”), so for the most part he is kept at a distance.  Which is fine. Really.

But then John sees Sherlock after school one day, rummaging through a locker just a few down from John’s own.  Sherlock pretends he doesn’t see him, and John is content with doing the same, until some athletic chap comes strutting down the hall, girls (including Sally) flocking after him.

Out of the corner of his eye, John sees the chap notice Sherlock, sees the grin twitch across his thin lips.  John thinks back to Sally’s odd and strangely thrilled disclosure (“he’s, like, batshit insane –“) and knows instantly that there could be trouble.

“What’s up Shirley?” the jock asks, casually pushing Sherlock face-first into his locker door. 

There is a wicked bang, and when Sherlock looks back up there is blood just starting to gather at the high arch of his eyebrow, and for some reason, for some strange and unknown and intrinsic reason, John is – absolutely fucking outraged.

“Oi, what’s your problem?” he snaps without thinking.

It might be his heightened teenage imagination, but it seems that the crowded hallway goes silent.  Everyone – Sherlock included – stares at him, and John desperately tries to will the words back into his mouth.

“ _Oi, what’s your problem_?” the jock mimics in a high voice.  “Who are you, the fucking Queen?”

In the corner of his eye, John can feel Sherlock watching him, feel the boy’s gaze as if it were something tangible and red-hot and furious.

“Yeah, that’s right,” John says, “I’m the fucking Queen.  Well done you.” It’s weak, but he’s running on pure mortified terror, and feels the lack of a snappy comeback can be temporarily forgiven.

“Hey Shirley, this your boyfriend?”

Sherlock says nothing, and the jock laughs.

“Fucking fag –“

John will later tell Harry that the jock threw the first punch and he was acting in self-defense, but it’s an absolute bloody lie, and he hasn’t been in a fight since primary, since before his dad shipped off forever and ever, but he remembers how to duck and weave, how not to flinch at the sick crack of someone’s jaw beneath your knuckles.

So he’s been at Tupper not even three weeks, and he’s already been hauled in front of the principal.  His only consolation is that the bloke stupid enough to start it all is sitting beside him.  On his other side, of course, is Sherlock – ice pack held over his swollen eye.

Mr. Lestrade steeples his fingers and leans over his desk, sighing heavily.  He’s a youngish, good-looking man, aged up by a head of grey hair.  His desk is littered with papers, and a coffee mug reading “Putting the Pal in Principal!”

“Anderson, this is seriously it for you, okay? If I hear about you and Sherlock fighting again, if I even hear whispers, we’re talking suspension from the team.  I don’t care what Mr. Kidd says, I’m not making empty threats here.  You can see how impressive the scouts find you when you’re sitting on the bench.”

“This is – Sherlock totally started this –“

John whips his head to stare at this Anderson character.

“Are you serious?  I bloody saw you shove him into his locker for no reason – he hadn’t said a word to you and –“

“I don’t need you rushing to my aid, thanks,” Sherlock sneers.

“Fine, I’ll be sure I don’t do it again –“

“Lover’s quarrel,” says Anderson.

Lestrade slams his hand down on the desk, and the room goes silent.

“Thanks so much for all the clarification, boys. You’ve been immensely helpful.” He jerks his head at Anderson.  “You. You can go.  You’re done here.  And you better hope to god I don’t see you in here again, Tyler, or you can kiss those scholarships goodbye.”

“Whatever,” Tyler says, hoisting his backpack and starting to rise.

“Excuse me?  What was that?”

“Nothing.” Tyler leaves, and Lestrade pins his clear-eyed gaze on Sherlock and John.

“So.  John Watson.  You’re new here, yeah?”

“Um.  Yes.”

“And Sherlock thought he’d bring you in, is that it?”

John looks from Lestrade to Sherlock and back again.

“Um. What?”

“Oh.” Lestrade nervously shuffles a stack of papers, “I shouldn’t have said that.”

Sherlock snorts disgustedly beside him.

“Lestrade, he’s just playing dumb.  It’s okay, John’s with me.  He’s my friend.”

“Your – I’m sorry, what?” Lestrade’s mouth is doing its best not to hang open, with little success.

“Lab partner,” John interrupts, feeling a growing sense of horror.

“Your –“ Lestrade trails off, pinches the bridge of his nose.  “Oh - okay. You know what? Fine.  Fine.  But I’m giving you a lot of credit, Sherlock, and I would hate to think you’re abusing my trust. I can’t keep letting you and your – pal, or whatever, off the hook, so just – Jesus – keep a low profile or something, okay? You’ve done the school good, but don’t fuck around.”

John – helplessly impressed by obscenity – decides that Lestrade is far and away superior to his Headmaster back at Whitecross, a purple-faced old man who favoured the strap a bit more than was appropriate.   Sherlock is evidently not quite as impressed; he rolls his eyes and rises.

“Pleasure as always.  Come on, John.”

John stands, hoisting his book bag, nodding politely at Lestrade who shakes his head in bewilderment. 

“I don’t want to see you – either of you – in here for like – two months, okay?  Unless you have something for me, just, please for the love of god – just stay away. My ulcer can’t handle it.”

“It’s not an ulcer, it’s chronic heartburn - see a physician for Christ’s sake.  Coming?” Sherlock turns in the doorway, looking back.

In the slick muscle of his heart, the dark red spaces between his ribs, John has a feeling that can’t be put into words (but if it could be put into words the words would be “ _god yes_.”)

He nods once, not trusting himself to speak, and follows Sherlock Holmes out of Lestrade’s office. 

Sherlock is leaning against the row of lockers like a painter’s model by the time John catches up with him.

“Hey, cheers for that – for getting me out of there. My mum would have gone spare if she had gotten a call from –“

“It has been three hours since there was any caffeine in my system,” Sherlock interrupts, distractedly looking at his iPhone. “This is unacceptable.”

He glances up at John, green eyes flashing. “Have you been to _The Laughing Bean_ yet?”

“Um – no.”

“Fantastic.” Sherlock turns on his heel to leave, heading toward Tupper’s main doors, “They won’t serve me more than four espresso’s a day, it’s fascism is what it is, you’re a godsend.”

Again, that feeling in John’s gut and heart and ribs, a feeling without a name and without precedent and without an ounce of sense.

He follows Sherlock Holmes down the hall and out of the school and into the café two blocks away.  He buys Sherlock two espressos and listens as he dissects the love-life of both the staff and the customers, occasionally losing himself with laughter (“Sherlock, you can’t possibly know that he is _macrosexual_ , what does that even mean?”) and later John will say he didn’t know his life was changing, didn’t know this was just the beginning of something beautiful and fucking awful but at the moment – looking back – he’s pretty sure he knew. 

Sherlock Holmes scowling and wiping foam off of his upper lip, and John’s pretty sure this was the first day of his life.


	2. Someone Like You

Three years after John’s dad dies, his mum decides it’s a good idea to ship him and Harry across the Atlantic _bloody_ ocean. 

John is – surprisingly okay with it, actually.  He’s sixteen years old, just finished his fifth year, and should probably be out of his mind with grief at losing the friends he’s basically known since primary school but – but he’s not.  Since ‘the accident’  - as John’s mum refers to it, air quotes practically visible around the words, people have started treating him with kid gloves, as if he’s liable to break in half and burst into tears at the sound of even a moderately raised voice.  His mates used to punch him in the shoulder; now they open the bloody doors for him, and the girls, well – that’s something best not even mentioned.  So when his mum sits him and Harry down at the table, tells them she’s been talking to Arthur (that’s the boyfriend, Arthur) and they’re ready to take things ‘to the next level’ and she’s going to drag the family halfway across the globe to move in with him – John thinks: “fine.”

He’s sick of being defined by tragedy, sick of being the broken boy, sick of the pitying sideways glances, the soft smiles, the “How’s your mum holding up, John?” and the “Your mum seeing anyone yet?” and the “You’ll be back on that field in no time, just hang in there,” as if he doesn’t know exactly how long he can expect to hang (by his bloody neck, more likely). 

The sad part is, he used to believe them.  After the surgery, there was a part of him that couldn’t wait for his first game back, local boy overcomes adversity, all that shite.  And then when it didn’t heal right, and they had to break his leg again, and everyone at school avoided his eyes for weeks, John thought: “well, fuck this” and grew harder and taller and more firmly rooted in the ground.

So yeah, he’s glad for a new start, a place where most of the town didn’t come to his dad’s funeral and watch Harry bawling like a beaten dog in the front pew (John didn’t cry, because he doesn’t cry, he doesn’t.).  He’s met Arthur, and Arthur is – while certainly not ideal – he’s a decent chap.  He’s flown over six times since he started chatting with John’s mum online, and every time he’s been overwhelmingly polite and awkward and irritating and frankly – _lovely_ to John’s mum.  And John may be only sixteen, and expected to feel at least a bit irrationally angry about the whole thing, but when it comes right down to it, he doesn’t feel much of anything.  Not at all.  He doesn’t want his mum to be alone, and he’s spent years trying to pretend he can’t hear her crying in the loo, and if _he_ wants a fresh start, god knows she probably wants one too.  He leaves the anger, the drama up to Harry, who pitches a fit when she discovers their mum has even put up an ad on a dating site (“betraying his memory,” “thought you loved him,” “already forgetting,” blah blah blah).  

“I’m not going,” Harry tells John, sneaking into his bedroom some time after midnight (a habit she picked up when they were kids and which she insists on continuing to his growing mortification – he’s a sixteen year old male, for Christ’s sake, he should be able to lock his bloody door.).  

Harry is eighteen and beautiful and John loves her.  She looks like his dad, long-limbed and fine-boned (John takes after his mum, short and fair and slightly squashy-nosed, it’s buggering unfair.).  

“You are fucking too going, and Harry seriously, I’m trying to sleep –“

“I won’t,” Harry insists, collapsing onto the foot of his bed.  She’s been out with friends, and she smells like cigarettes and lager. “If she thinks I’m going to go all that fucking way to play happy families with some old creep – I mean, who meets someone online and then moves to another _country_?  Does she even know him, really, what if he’s some sort of serial killer, John, or a pervert or –“

“He’s fine.” John isn’t ready for a well-reasoned argument; he’s just been woken from a lovely dream about Kate Nash.  “You’ve met him, they’re – they’re mad for each other and I think we should be – be happy, I think –“

“I don’t care what you think,” Harry tells him, “I’m not going.  I’m eighteen years old, I can do what I bloody want.”

“Jesus Christ, Harry,” John says, and three months later, Harry is sitting beside him on a plane across the ocean, decidedly _not speaking_ to his mum, and getting slowly trashed on the complimentary beverage service (John wonders for the first time, if maybe they should have let her stay.)

Arthur lives in a smallish house in one of the numerous sprawling suburbs outside a much larger city.  The West Coast, fenced in by the Pacific Ocean, warm and rainy for most of the year.  It isn’t like Hereford is pint-sized or anything, and John’s been to Manchester once or twice but his new hometown has over two million people and is a wild sea of glass and concrete. It’s like living in a fifties dream of the future, and John feels hunted and enfolded by sheet-metal skyscrapers, feels like a thousand concrete fingers are slowly closing over him.   It’s not so bad out where Arthur lives, mostly shite condos and cookie-cutter houses, but on the day trips they take into the city proper, John feels like he can’t quite catch his breath, like something is pressing heavy on his stomach and his spine.

It doesn’t matter.

They stay with Arthur through August, before John goes back to school.  The plan from the beginning has been that John would board at Tupper Secondary, which is in the heart of downtown, but is assuredly the best school in the city (according to his mum).  The commute would be a nightmare, an hour each way, and John’s mum will be traveling a lot with her work (and John bloody well isn’t going to live on his own with Arthur.).   This will give his mum and Arthur a chance to take some time for themselves, see how they fit (so his mum says, while Harry makes gagging faces in the background). 

It doesn’t matter.

 Harry spends the summer months looking for work, and thinking loudly about applying for uni somewhere on the coast, but mostly becoming acquainted with the nearby pubs, making loads of sketchy friends, and drunkly hassling John at four in the bloody morning (not that big a deal, like he’s getting any sleep in Arthur’s guest room).  He hears his mum and Arthur have Serious Conversations about her sometimes over breakfast when they think he’s upstairs or has his headphones in, and John wants to tell them to back the fuck off; she’s been dragged halfway across the world, just out of Upper Sixth, and they haven’t even been here for a month yet – surely she deserves some time?  John knows she’ll sort it out, and before August is out Harry is working at some grocery store, and evenings at a coffee shop, so that’s fine then, and on the night before John is set to move into Tupper, Harry and his mum have an intense, cloistered discussion which turns into a screaming row, which turns into Harry packing her bags and her guitar and fucking off.

“Holy shit,” John says aloud after the last door slams, and Arthur looks up from his newspaper, widens his eyes, and nods.  

His mum won’t say a word of what it’s about, and Harry won’t answer the phone or his texts, and he’s in a bit of a panic, demanding his mum call the police, or that they get in Arthur’s car and circle the neighbourhood (what if she’s being murdered, what if she’s sleeping on the street, it’s raining outside, Jesus.).  Neither Arthur or his mum can be arsed, so John goes for a walk and shouts her name and when he gets home two hours later, water-logged and blue from the cold, his mum goes a bit spare and there are Words and at this point John is very much pleased to be moving out the next day.

At three a.m., he gets a text.

**Alive @ a frends luv u somuch.  HW**

John doesn’t text back, but clenches his fingers around the phone as if it were a hand that he could hold.

***

It goes like this.  

Sherlock starts to wait for John after biology class.  The first time he has a question about the notes he missed the week before, and John is more than a little disturbed because why would Sherlock need bio notes when he’s got the textbook memorized?  The next time he has to point out the numerous errors in the notes that John lent him (“Not your fault, really, it’s this public school system.”) and perhaps he should have lunch with John and explain the specific intricacies of Mr. Stamford’s ignorance?  After that, Sherlock knows where John eats, starts showing up every Tuesday and Thurday, and then the occasional Monday, and then it’s every day of the week, the two of them eating lunch together in the cafeteria or the chemistry lab while the rest of the Grade 11 kids look on in horror.  Not that Sherlock eats (but he drinks two thermos’ worth of scalding black coffee, and politely refuses John’s offers of half a sandwich or a packet of crisps or whatever.  No wonder he’s so bloody skinny.).

They don’t talk about anything personal, not really.  John’s under the impression (distinctly likely) that Sherlock knows all about his family life anyway, just from the way he bites his nails or some bloody thing.  Sherlock is excellent at deflecting personal questions, and after the first half dozen John basically gives up.  He doesn’t mind; it’s interesting enough to have Sherlock explain why it’s so obvious that Teacher A is sleeping with Teacher B, and the completely ridiculous existence of the Diving Bell spider, and the twenty-one ways it would be possible to break into the school undetected.

It’s about a month into their acquaintance when the girl shows up.

They’re in the chemistry lab at the time, mostly alone.  A slight, red-headed girl is also there, peering into a microscope on the other side of the room (John tried to introduce himself, which resulted in her biting her lip and widening her eyes and saying nothing, so he’s given up in that area.)

Anyway, a tiny blond girl suddenly appears in the doorway, rapping once like it’s a private room, before coming in.  Her face is lit up all doe-eyed with terror, and John tries to smile helpfully at her as she stands beside their table, twisting a piece of paper between her small fingers.

“Sherlock Holmes?” the girl squeaks.

Sherlock does not even look up from the contents of his petri dish, shows absolutely no sign of acknowledgement.

“I wouldn’t normally do this, but – someone told me that you could help me.”  The girl casts a nervous look toward the far end of the lab.

“That someone couldn’t possibly have been Karen Gordon, could it?” Sherlock asks, still not looking up.  “And don’t worry about Molly; god knows _I_ don’t.”

From across the room, the redhead named Molly rolls her eyes.

“Yeah – yes, that’s – how did you know?”

Sherlock finally lowers himself to make eye contact with the person he’s speaking with.  John, on the other hand, is being resolutely ignored by everyone.

“You may look like a freshman, but I’m guessing you’re in Grade 10 – this judging by the practice schedule you’re twisting in your hands.  Freshmen don’t usually make the teams, and your diminuitive stature suggests that cheerleading is the most likely extracurricular.  That’s obviously where you met Karen, one of the few Grade 10 students familiar with my work.”

“Your work?” John interrupts, and both Sherlock and the cheerleader blink, as if they had forgotten he was here.   John considers the weirdly vague conversation, the nervous energy of the tiny blonde girl.  “Wait – do you – are you selling drugs, here?”

“Excellent deduction, John.  Completely wrong, but still points for effort.”  

“I’m not trying to buy drugs,” the girl protests, “Honest, I’m – someone keeps breaking into my locker.  Almost three times a week, since term started.  Moving stuff around – they don’t take anything usually but –“

“Boring,” Sherlock sighs, tilting his head back in frustration.

“It isn’t!” the girl insists, finally looking at John in the hopes of winning some sympathy.  “I hate it.”

“Sherlock, can you just –“

“It’s textbook, it’s too obvious.  Did you break up with anyone over the summer?”

“Um.” The girl takes a shakey breath.  “Yes.  How did you –“

“The ex has obviously got your old combination – it would be a simple matter of finding out your new locker number.  It’s either him or his current girlfriend – oh, you didn’t know about her?  I’m confident that you can figure the rest out for yourself.”

“Andrew’s dating someone?” The blonde’s voice has gone very quiet. “Already?  But –“

“Please tell Karen to refrain from sending anyone my way unless there is an _actual_ mystery to be solved.  The mind stagnates without challenge.”

The girl manages a teary nod, before turning on her heel and escaping.  John stares across the table at his friend – or lab partner – or whatever.

“Do you want to tell me what that was all about?”

“I solve mysteries,” Sherlock says this as if it’s boring as well, taking a noisy sip from his thermos of coffee.   

“Of course you do.”  It takes John a moment to realize that Sherlock is not kidding.  “Oh god.   _You do_.  That’s why you and – Lestrade were so –“

“Knew you’d get there.”  Sherlock looks up at John with an odd, pleased expression in his wide set eyes.

“So you just – you turn in other kids for like – breaking rules – and he gives you free run of the school, or –“

“I’m not a rat,” Sherlock protests, sounding horrified, “I’ve never done anything so pedestrian in my life.  What must you think of me?”

John wants to point out that they met not even a month ago, and he doesn’t really know what to think, frankly.  He finds himself consistently torn between awe and embarrassment and annoyance and grudging affection and  – it’s enough to make him a bit dizzy, trying to reconcile it all while still managing to walk and talk and remember to breathe.

“I solve mysteries, John,” Sherlock says again, as if this will make John understand.  “I don’t turn in freshman for smoking pot beneath the bleachers, or stealing from the supply room or – students, teachers, they approach _me_.  And if they have a case that is actually important, or – in the even more unlikely event – _interesting_ , then I help them.”

John can’t quite shake the feeling that he’s being wound up here.  Sherlock Holmes, Teen Detective.  They’ll make a killing with merchandising.  

“Karen Gordon’s sister was in Grade 12 when she disappeared,” Sherlock continues, voice pitched low.  He leans across the table, closer to John, and John feels a momentary flash of something hotter than panic in his stomach.  “She had a bit of a reputation, and the police and family – well, most of the family – assumed she had run off with a new boyfriend.  Karen didn’t believe it and asked me for help, and I connected her sister to a series of internet scams, the profits of which she had used to purchase a large amount of cocaine and an apartment two towns over.”

“Oh.”  His imagined television series just took a turn for the dark.  “That’s awful.”

“Well, she’s fine – in rehab now, I think.  But that is the sort of thing I do.  Not petty snitching on little Johnny for calling little Susie a bad word.  Work, John.  Real work.”

“And – why do you do this exactly?” John asks, voicing the question that has been on his mind since this discussion began.  

“They pay me sometimes.  Under the table.  Offer me extra grade points – ridiculous, since it isn’t like I need the help.  And Lestrade stays out of my way, gives me access to the chemistry lab after hours.”

“The chem lab?  You’re like – fighting crime for access to a bloody chem lab?”

“Well.” Sherlock scowls briefly, leaning back.  “Mostly I do it because I can.”

And really – when it comes to Sherlock, John doesn’t need more of an answer than that.

***

It goes like this:  John sits down to dinner with his mother and _Arthur_ (John wants to tear the skin of his face, but it isn’t like Arthur’s not trying, he just helplessly brings this reaction out in people).

John hasn’t really seen his mum much since school started; she’s been away on business, and John’s been fairly decently swamped with homework, and even on the quiet nights two hours is a hell of a commute just to have tea and biscuits while pointedly not talking about Harry or his dad.  It’s good to see his mum now, there’s no question, but she looks tired and it makes him worry, and then he starts to worry about Harry and where the hell she is right now, and that makes him angry at his mother, and why haven’t they been able to patch things up – they’re adults, after all, this is ridiculous.

So, yeah, he’s got a lot on his mind as he digs into his fish and chips, and is almost thankful for the distraction of the chime as his mobile gets a text.

**1 st  Ave and Alma.  Come immediately.  SH**

John sighs, trying to ignore the weird little thrill that runs through him at the sight of the initials.  

**Family dinner, sorry.  JW**

His phone chimes again, and his mum raises her eyebrow from across the table.

“I’m having a perfectly pleasant evening, but by all means, John, if you have something you’d rather be doing –“

Oh, and that’s so like her – impecable politeness layered thin as pastry over razorblades.  He forces a tight smile.

“Just someone from school.  Sorry.”

**Tell them there’s been a fire in the dorms.  SH**

**I don’t think I gave u my number.  JW**

John hesitates, then sends another.

**Also that last bit better not be true.  JW**

John slides his phone into his jacket pocket, turning back to his dinner.  There is silence for a blessed moment, and his mum looks appropriately mollified.

“Trying out for any teams this year, or –“ Arthur begins, before going instantly and mortifyingly silent.  John’s mum lays a reassuring hand on his arm.

“You remember, John isn’t – he can’t –“

“Busted leg, me,” John finishes for her, and Arthur winces.

“I know – she did tell me.  I’m sorry, I completely –“

Dinner is saved by John’s phone chiming again.

**Hacked your phone during frog dissection.  SH**

**You did not.  JW**

No sooner has he sent the text than his phone rings, blasting out the chorus of Adele’s “Someone Like You,” oh dear god.  His mum raises her eyebrows, and John murmurs some type of apology before leaving the table.

“Personalized your ring tone as well,” Sherlock says the moment John answers the phone.  “Will you come?”

“No – Sherlock, I’m bloody miles away, like a good hour by bus.  My mum lives all the way out in goddamn suburbia, there’s no way –“

“I know where your mother lives,” Sherlock sighs, drawn out and put upon, as if John is deliberately trying to inconvenience him. “I’ll steal a car – meet you at the nearest bus stop in twenty.”

“Sherlock – I can’t.  I’m having dinner and – wait, what?  Don’t steal a car, Christ,  that’s just –“

“Oh, John, really.  It’s no trouble.”  Sherlock hangs up, and John instantly calls him back, white-lipped and pretty close to furious, but all he gets is a series of rings and an obnoxious messaging system (“Sherlock Holmes, much too busy to answer this phone call, leave a message if you absolutely must but for god’s sake make it interesting –“).

John has a few messages in mind, but none that he can risk his mum overhearing in the next room.

“I’ve got to go,” John tells them, returning to table.

“What?  You’ve hardly eaten,” his mum protests, more irritated than concerned.

“Is something up?” Arthur asks, trying to sound hip and parental at the same time.  John can’t really hate him that badly – the poor bloke is trying, it’s just the trying that does it, really.

“Was Emma Hudson on the phone.  The, uh, the dorm head.  Said there’s been a small fire in one of the rooms near to mine, and I’m to come see if there’s any damage.”

“Good lord,” his mum says, “That’s awful.  Arthur – we’ll have to give him a ride back, I don’t want things being left –“

“No, no,” John waves her offer away, wondering what kind of terrible trouble Sherlock would get into if he arrived at the bus stop and John wasn’t there.  “It’s – fine.  Emma was pretty certain that nothing happened, she just thought it best if I – double check, and that.  Just a small fire, hotplate sort of thing, I’m sure it’s all fine.  But I don’t want to sit here all night worrying about it.”

“Of course not,” Arthur says, and John’s mum sighs, sips distractedly at her wine.

“Well, if you’re sure.  It’s a long bus ride –“

“It’s fine.  Sorry to rush off, though.  We’ll have to –“ John doesn’t want to say it, doesn’t even know why he _is_ saying it, what on earth could possibly compell him – “do it again some time.  Soon, okay?”

His mum hugs him tightly at the door, after arming him with several takeaway containers of fish and chips, rapidly growing soggy in their own grease.  

“Take care of yourself, my sweet boy,” she whispers, getting a bit emotional the way she occasionally does when white wine is involved.  “It’s hard being this far away from you.  Call me when you get home, okay?”

“Of course, mum.  Cheers.”

Ten minutes later, John is four blocks away, and a mother-fucking _Aston Marton_ comes to a screeching halt in front of him, smoke billowing from the tires.  John lurches back, momentarily horrified, until the passenger window rolls down and he is horrified for entirely different reasons.

“Need a lift?” Sherlock asks, curling the corner of his mouth.  

“You absolute – fucking –“ John cannot even process this, and Sherlock peers out the window.  “Do you – where did you get this?  This is an Aston bloody – there will cops after you, okay, there will be serious consequences –“

“For God’s sake,” Sherlock sighs, though there is a hint of amusement beneath his irritation, “it’s just my father’s, and he’s certainly not going to miss it.  Are you coming or aren’t you?”

John makes a show of hesitating, and almost convinces himself that he is seriously thinking about his answer, that he didn’t just cut out on dinner with his mum because Sherlock told him to, that he’s not about to drive across town in the car from James fucking Bond because Sherlock gave the word.  There are some things that are just too ridiculous to admit, even to yourself.

“All right, fine.” John gets into the car, purposely ignoring Sherlock’s snort of laughter, and the way the leather seats feel like buttercream icing, oh dear god.

Sherlock peels out violently, cutting through oncoming traffic and blowing past a yellow light.  John quickly realizes that he will not have time to fall in love with this car because he is going to be too busy clenching the armrests and trying not to be sick all over himself.

“Can you – slow the fuck down, maybe?” he finally hisses, eyes squeezed shut, “You’ve already stolen a bloody car, do you really need to get pulled over for – PEDESTRIAN, Sherlock, fuck – driving like a lunatic?”

“Time is of the essence.  Obviously,” Sherlock replies, swerving in and out of two lanes on the highway.  

John realizes that he might die today, might die in the next minute and a half the way things are going.  It strikes him as a little odd that he does not mind so much.  Fearing for one’s life is a bit – exhilarating, actually, once you get over the nausea and the blinding fury.

“Don’t change my ringtone again, all right?  Bloody Adele, you can’t be –“

“Oh, fuck right off,” Sherlock says, glancing over at him with wide, dark eyes, “She’s lovely.”

John laughs out loud, and Sherlock barely avoids killing them both, just veering away from the oncoming semi-trailer at the last possible moment.  

John eventually realizes they are heading toward one of the various beaches he’s heard so much about.  He hasn’t actually visited one yet – Tupper’s about a forty-minute bus ride to the closest beach, and it’s pretty much been constant rain throughout September.  He’d put off a visit to the ocean until the weather improved, and despite his mum’s critical disbelief that he wasn’t that bothered about “the most beautiful city in the world,” he was basically fine with it.  Didn’t see what the fuss was about, really; England has more than a few bloody beaches, and John was never the type to lie about in the sun (unless he wanted to end up with a nasty burn).  Now, however, with Sherlock’s headlights illuminating the empty stretch of sand, the misty mountains in the distance and the rolling grey waves – John begins to change his mind.

“Wait in the car,” Sherlock says, pulling over. 

“What?  I thought you needed –“

“Won’t be a minute.” 

“You drag me out all this way, and then –“

Sherlock leaves the car and slams the door, cutting John off mid-indignant-rant.  

“Fuck’s sake,” John sighs, but doesn’t follow.  He watches Sherlock’s narrow, dark silhouette grow smaller and smaller as he heads toward the water’s edge.  

Somewhere in the darkness, the lights of an oil tanker flicker like candles on a cake. 

There is no one around, and no other cars that he can see.  Five minutes go by, then ten. Sherlock has completely disappeared from sight, and John waits, _fairly_ certain that his friend has not been murdered or drowned or forgotten completely about him.  Eventually, he fumbles through his numerous jacket pockets for his phone.

**Where r u?  JW**

After another ten minutes, there is no response from Sherlock, but there is a pair of slow-moving headlights approaching the Aston from behind.  John takes a deep breath, tells himself this is nothing to do with him, and the car will pull past and that will be that.  As it is, the car is nearly even with the Aston before John realizes it’s the police.  

**Oh my fucking god.  JW**

The constable that knocks on the driver’s side window is young and friendly looking, in that slightly menacing way that young cops can look friendly.  He’s got a bloody torch and everything, peering in like he’s expecting to find dozens of corpses, freshly killed.  John tries to roll down the window, before realizing that he can’t because the car is turned off (and of course Sherlock took the bloody keys), so he awkwardly leans over and opens the driver’s side door.

“Evening, son,” the constable says, slight twitch at the corner of his mouth.  “Nice ride you’ve got here.”

“I know, right,” John laughs nervously.  “Oh – it’s, it’s not mine.  I should be so – no, it’s my friend’s.”

“Where’s this friend of yours, then?”

“He’s just – just down the beach there.”

“Where exactly?” The constable straightens, shines his torch toward the shoreline where Sherlock is nowhere to be found.

“I really – I couldn’t tell you.  I’m just waiting for him, he said he’d be – “

“What kind of business does your friend have way out here at this hour?”

“Nothing, just – I mean, probably just taking it all in or – you know, the beach and everything –“

“The beach and everything,” the officer repeats, not a question.  “Yeah, I’m going to need you to step out of the car, sir.”

“I’m – what?” John attempts another laugh, since that went so well the first time, “I’m sorry, am I breaking a law or something –“

“Is there a problem here?” the constable asks, and John’s heart drops into his feet because it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know that this is going to end badly, “I’d like to see some form of identification.”

 It is at this moment that Sherlock Holmes decides to grace the universe with his presence.

“Problem, officer?”

The constable whirls around, obviously taken by surprise and John waits for the bloke to tase them both and slap them in handcuffs.

“Sherlock fucking Holmes,” the constable says instead, and John knows that things are worse than he could possibly have imagined.

“Gary,” Sherlock says, with a tight nod, and the constable turns, grinning at John.

John is so alarmed that he grins back immediately, regardless of the fact that he has no fucking idea what is going on.  He wonders if he could light Sherlock on fire through the power of his discomfort.

“You should have said this was your friend,” the constable tells him,  “Christ, I was getting ready to put the fear of god in you.”

John chooses to ignore that last part.  “You two – I’m guessing you two know each other?”

“Know each other?” ‘Gary’ laughs, and slaps Sherlock on the back, and John is confident he’s the only one who notices Sherlock’s little twitch of disdain.  “This guy, this guy right here.”  He slaps Sherlock on the back again.  “Proved I wasn’t sleeping with my landlord’s wife, got him off my back, let me tell you.  Fucking genius or some shit, I don’t know.  Am I right, buddy?”

Sherlock nods again, and Gary shakes his head.  

“Guess I should let you boys get on with your evening.”  He winks.    “You – uh – you be safe now.”

He heads back to his car, before John can think up an appropriate response besides “What God No” and Sherlock slides into the driver’s seat.  

“Did he – “ John manages, “he definitely thought that we – that the two of us –“

“Twenty-one point six four minutes for the police to arrive,” Sherlock ignores him, looking at his watch.  “Good enough to be going on with, I think.”

With that he peels away from the curb, blowing past Gary’s patrol car and just missing a red light.  John fully expects the sirens to come on behind them, but the roads are blessedly silent and with the way Sherlock drives they make it to John’s dorm in less than thirty minutes.

John is still not speaking to Sherlock by the time they pull up in front of the tallish brick building, but he finds he has to ask the obvious question.

“How  - and I’m probably going to regret asking this but – how do you know where I live?”

Sherlock gives him the typical flat, assessing gaze that somehow manages to ask _Do you really want to know?_ and _Isn’t it completely obvious?_ at the same time.

“You don’t live with your mother, that much is clear from our conversation tonight – you’re usually two to three minutes late for class, which means you consistently underestimate the amount of time it’s going to take you to get there, so you must live close by.  Your leg seems to bother you more on Mondays, which speaks to going up and down stairs more often during the weekends, and this is the only dorm room that’s more than one story and doesn’t have an elevator.”

“Oh.  Well, yes, when you put it like that –“

“The light fading on your clothes suggests to a room on the west side so –“ Sherlock leans over John, staring up at the brick building, “that one, I should think.”

Sherlock points out John’s (completely non-descript) dormroom window, and John gasps, “Amazing,” before he can stop himself.  Sherlock leans away, smirking.

“I’m still pissed off at you, though,” John says, wondering when he is going to get out of the car, why the hell hasn’t he left yet, “Just because you’re so clever, doesn’t –“

“You’re angry?” Sherlock asks, alarm colouring his low voice, “What – why?”

“Why?” John sighs, “You left me in the car all alone, didn’t say a word of where you were going or why – the fucking police came and were going to do god-knows-what with me if you hadn’t shown up.”

Sherlock snorts derisively.  “They were not.”

“Yes, well I didn’t know that, did I?”

Sherlock steeples his fingers together, and rests them just slightly against his mouth.  John feels a sudden lurch in his chest that doesn’t feel like anger, but it must be.  It has to be.

“Interesting,” Sherlock says after a moment, and John reminds himself to leave the car.  “You want to be more involved.”

“What?  No, I –“

“You do.”  Sherlock turns quickly, pinning John in his gaze.  “I didn’t expect that.”

Sherlock looks as if nothing unexpected has happened to him in the past sixteen years of his life, and John has just personally affronted him – never mind that Sherlock is out of his barking tree, and John certainly _does not_ want to be any more involved.  He’s already too involved as it is, and they barely know each other.

H realizes that he is staring at Sherlock and Sherlock is staring at him and neither one is speaking. 

“Better go,” John says quickly, fumbling with his seat belt.  Sherlock is still staring at him, quiet and uncomfortable, and John nods a quick goodnight while opening the door.  “See you in – um – class, or whatever.”

He closes the door, and as he walks toward the entrance he hears the Martin’s window roll quietly down.

“Are you still angry?” Sherlock calls after him, more amused than concerned, and John feels the corner of his mouth twitch in a grin (something is wrong with him, something at a cellular level, something he was born with and only got worse over time because he’s not angry anymore, he’s really, really not.)

“Go home, Sherlock,” he shouts over his shoulder, and tries not to flinch at the shriek of rubber as Sherlock speeds away down the street.

He takes the stairs up to his room, and texts his mum that everything’s fine, no permanent fire damage, and he lays on his bed, staring up at the ceiling.

Something is wrong with him (Sherlock touches his mouth with just the tips of his white fingers) and John pushes the image from his mind.

***

This is the story of the first time Sherlock breaks into John’s dormroom. 

Sherlock needs data, and he knows where John lives, and he knows that John is at a calculus study group (dull) and he knows three ways to get into the dormitory undetected.  It starts to get dark early in the fall, so Sherlock goes with method c) and scales the rough brick wall of the building.  It isn’t that he is a particularly good climber, but it’s a matter of angles, really.  All movement is math, and once you’ve created the equation it’s simply a case of going from point A to point B, and point A is that jut of brick three inches above his head, and point B is the top of the window frame and point K is the ledge below John’s window, which is unlocked (careless but convenient, and Sherlock takes this as John’s engraved invitation to enter).

So.  The room is more or less what he suspected.  Small, bed against the window (old mattress, destroying John’s back), chest of drawers, desk, sink and mirror (shared bathroom for each floor).  It is perfectly functional, and Sherlock thinks that perhaps he should stay in the dorms next year, maybe this sort of quiet, enclosed space would be conducive to thinking, _really_ thinking (Sherlock composes a hypothesis that high ceilings decrease brain activity, to be tested at a later date.).  

Data then.  

Sherlock lies on John’s bed - sheets tucked in, clothing put away, fastidious, competent – ordinary.  He tries to fit himself into his John’s brain for just a moment, imagine what it is like to live in a room with rounded edges and soft colours and silence, blessed fucking silence.  It is difficult.  He keeps getting distracted by the smell of the sheets underneath him, marijuana and sweat and cardamom and  - well, he could go on, could trace each surface John has come in contact with since two showers previous, but there isn’t any point; it doesn’t bring John any closer, doesn’t make his skin any easier to inhabit.  And Sherlock wants to, he _wants to_.  What must it be like?

Aggravated, he turns onto his stomach, crawls to the edge of the mattress.  He sticks his arm beneath the bed, searching for something that would make the experience of John more concrete, relevant.  Old t-shirt, single sock, used kleenex – dull.  Sherlock turns his explorations toward the mattress itself, feeling between the box spring, looking for some evidence of John’s life away from him.  John’s taken his laptop this evening but Sherlock’s already read his emails and gone through his bookmarks and Google history.  Games, news sites, pornography - par for the adolescent course, Sherlock supposes.  He wouldn’t really know.  

There are footsteps on the stairs outside, but they are too heavy to be John, so Sherlock ignores them.

Sherlock tries again to imagine John, at night, in bed with images of blond hair and tanned skin and pounds of silicone. Is he attracted to these women?  Does he imagine having sex with them?  Or is it something far more innocent – does he imagine dates and dances, kisses and long mornings in bed?  Sometimes Sherlock looks at John and sees something lonesome about him, something altogether unusual and extraordinary and thinks – he cannot want the same things as other Grade 11 boys.  Surely.  Because John radiates difference, even as he radiates the average; the point is that he _radiates_ and sometimes Sherlock looks at him and has to cover his eyes.

John Watson makes Sherlock want to – mortifyingly – _show off_.  That’s the truth of it.  The way John says ‘brilliant’ and ‘amazing’ without thinking about it, so impressed and sincere, makes Sherlock want to read John’s palms and hairline and soles of his shoes, make him say ‘brilliant’ again and again, whether he wants to or not.  And it is not – it is not Sherlock’s area, this heavy, awkward attachment.  It is frankly uncomfortable, like the way his left hand goes numb when he’s sleeping, his body becoming useless to him.  Distracting.  

There are footsteps on the stairs outside, too light a tread to be John, so Sherlock ignores them.

He digs through the top drawer of John’s night table, finds hand lotion (dull), cough drops, a first aid kit.  The second drawer is much more promising; tucked into an envelope, Sherlock discovers a stack of photos.  He flips through them, discarding the less interesting ones on the bed.  Most are of John and previous friends/acquaintances, reasonably attractive boys and girls but nothing to write home about.  In one, Sherlock finds photographic evidence pointing to two short-term girlfriends and a loss of virginity at fifteen – one year below the UK average.  Sherlock can understand on a hypothetical level.  John has a trustworthy face, statistically speaking – high inner eyebrows, pronounced cheekbones, round chin.  Sherlock can see nothing exceptional about it, but that doesn’t mean that no one else could (though John’s hair is another story, a combination of 38 variations of blond and Sherlock finds it fascinating, utterly and infinitely fascinating). 

Enough of that.

There is another set of photos that catch Sherlock’s attention: John and a bunch of soccer playing boys, arms slung around each other, sweaty and happy after an obviously hard-earned victory.  John seems to be leaning a bit too close to a dark-haired boy of his acquaintance, and there’s another photo of John and the same boy laughing at something out of frame, but their eyes are just for each other, so _that_ clears up any doubts that Sherlock may have had about John Watson’s sexuality (Sherlock didn’t have many.).  

It is interesting, Sherlock supposes, in a vicarious sort of way.  He doesn’t usually care much for the love-lives of his fellow students unless they directly relate to a case of some sort (which quite often, they do).

There is movement on the stairs outside, an unbalanced step, less weight on the right leg than the left.  Sherlock feels the strange urge to check his hair in the mirror, before John Watson bursts through the door, all 38 variations of colour in his hair.  

John freezes, mouth opening and closing like a fish, and Sherlock should be bored of it all, should be bored beyond belief of this unextraordinary boy and his unextraordinary life, but he is – not.  He wants to tell John where he was tonight and what he did and what he ate, wants to talk and talk and talk like a fucking parrot until John pats him on the head and tells him he’s astonishing.

“What – the hell – are you doing here?” John says slowly, so slowly, as if his outrage is convincing in the slightest.

“Scaled your wall,” Sherlock says quickly, “Looking through your drawers –” and John crosses the room angrily, grabbing the photos out of his hand.

“Look, that’s my – that’s my private – how the hell did you scale the fucking wall?” 

“Mathematics,” Sherlock explains, and John makes a low, unhappy sound deep in his throat.

“Mathematics, yeah, alright,” he says, “Look, just – the next time you decide you need to break into – just stay out of my stuff, okay?  The bed is fine, just don’t –”

John is negotiating with him, even though Sherlock is obviously in the wrong.  Interesting.  Sherlock pointedly glances at the clock, seeing how far he can take this.  John follows his gaze and frowns.

“Past ten,” John says, “Didn’t realize it had got so late.”

“The scintillating powers of calculus,” Sherlock says, and the corner of John’s mouth twitches, and it is fascinating, more fascinating than calculus.

“Whereabouts do you live, anyway?” John asks, “Are you taking the bus home, or – does one even run this late, or –”

“I don’t know,” Sherlock lies, “Suppose I’ll have to walk, or something.  Won’t take much more than an hour.”

John gives him a look that is clearly meant to imply that he is not fooled, but whatever – if Sherlock wanted to convince John, he could, he is certain of it.  If Sherlock wanted John to think he was dead and buried, it would only be too easy.   John trusts him and that is unexpected and marvelous and awful all at once.

“You want to stay over?” John asks, slowly, and Sherlock nearly crows his victory, he is unstoppable.  “I’ve got loads of extra blankets and a pillow and everything.  I could make you up a bed on the floor.  But of course, if you’d rather walk home - ”

“Come to think of it, the weather _is_ rather inclement,” Sherlock says quickly, and John smiles again with just the corner of his mouth, and Sherlock wants to calculate the angle of that smile, the radius and the area and perhaps these numbers will explain the effect it has on him.

“Next time, just bloody ask, okay?” John says, and Sherlock nods, a nod he doesn’t even half mean.  “And seriously, don’t go through my fucking pictures, god knows I look like a twat in most of them.”

Sherlock cannot believe that appearance is John’s main concern, but it’s just one in a long list of ways that John surprises him, utterly, every single day.  And Sherlock does not get surprised.  Every action and reaction has a long ambling road of motivations, and when one possesses the powers of observation that Sherlock does, one should be able to – essentially – predict the course of one’s entire life, and yet – and yet (38 variations of a single colour, it’s completely absurd.)

John throws a pile of blankets and a single pillow on the ground, and Sherlock is caught off guard.  He hadn’t really intended to stay, was just pulling strings to see if he could break them, but he didn’t have an exit strategy and now John is looking at him with something like confusion in his eyes.

“I – “ Sherlock begins to make his excuses.

“Not good enough?  Need more lower-back support or something?”

_No, but you do_ , Sherlock does not say.  John has crawled onto the bed, opening his laptop over his stretched out legs, and he nudges his feet into Sherlock’s thigh.

“What?” John asks, and Sherlock looks at the floor and thinks how very tired he suddenly is, and how very likely there will be rain before he gets home, and how things have gotten quite out of his control.

“I’ll – I’ll just text my mother,” Sherlock says without thinking.

The floor is surprisingly comfortable.

“Don’t get used to it,” John tells him from his bed, absently checking his email, “Next time you break in, you’re out in the street.  And stay the fuck away from my drawers, that’s seriously not cool.”

“Right,” Sherlock says, an obedient little Spaniel, but he doesn’t mean a word of it, and he knows John doesn’t either.   That night, he lies awake to the sound of John’s heavy, even breathing and thinks that the wall was only too easy to climb, the window was only too easy to open and this nest of blankets is more comfortable than all the pillow-top mattresses his mother can buy.  He thinks about the next available opportunity he will have to break into this room, and he thinks about the colour of John’s hair, and Pi to the 78th place, and Arcangelo Corelli’s _Sinfonia in D Minor_ , and the cat-like curve of John Watson’s upper lip, and he does not sleep – cannot possibly sleep with this breathing, wheezing, sweet-smelling distraction a mere three point four feet away from him but – but for some reason, Sherlock has never felt more comfortable.  The hard floor is like a pillow and the blankets smell like John, and the whole thing is ridiculously unsettling.  Sherlock vows to make a habit of this, forever and ever, the end.


	3. Fake Empire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Potentially triggering discussions of homophobia, substance use, and hints of sexual abuse. Really not a major part of this chapter, but a warning is probably necessary. If you want to check in about how any of this is portrayed, either badly or goodly, I love all your feedback like it was my unrequited high school crush, and am so grateful for your insights and comments.

It goes like this.

In October, John gets trapped in the equipment room during the Halloween dance, staking out a student who’s been distributing bad ecstasy tablets (“Fucking hell, Sherlock,” Lestrade says, rubbing a hand through his hair, “Thanks and everything, but next time try not to burn the school to the ground.”)

In November, John tackles a Grade 12 student who’s been stealing credit cards from the change-room lockers for the purposes of identity theft (“Wouldn’t have happened in my day,” Lestrade says, swallowing a handful of antacids, “A different world, and all that.  Just be grateful his parents aren’t suing the school for his sprained shoulder.”)

In December, John gets good grades in every class but biology, where his test scores are off the map, and spends ten hours stuffed in his locker by a group of Grade 11’s that Sherlock’s tied to some vicious online bullying (“Try not to get yourself killed over the holidays,” Lestrade says, pinching the bridge of his nose, “I, for one, will be fucking off to Mexico, and I better not get any texts, Sherlock, seriously, this time I mean it.”)

Over Christmas, John spends a week at home with his mum and Arthur, texting Harry obsessively (and getting a reply one tenth of the time, but hell – a reply is a reply, it means there’s a pulse on the end of the line.)

His mum very pointedly does not mention her daughter, and on Christmas day they all clink wine glasses and John says “Just fucking call her already,” and there’s the appropriately noisy backlash.

Conversely, John spends New Years Eve in his dorm room, stoned out of his mind with Sherlock Holmes.

“How is it that we’ve ended up in three of the same classes this term?” he asks, and Sherlock dissolves in giggles, really, ‘giggles’ is the only word for it.  John never would have thought of Sherlock Holmes as a giggler, but it must be the pot that does the funny things to John’s heart and stomach.  He smoked a bit back home, but he’s heard things about this West Coast shite and really, his legs wouldn’t move if the residence was on fire, he is _done._

“Seriously,” John says, refusing to be distracted by Sherlock being adorable.  “You’re in _art_ now, bloody art?”

“How dare you disparage my appreciation of the finer things?” Sherlock asks in mock outrage, and John throws a pillow at him, and really – by all accounts, it is an excellent start to the New Year.

At school, things change.  Have changed.  John and Sherlock eat lunch together every day, and the kids who come up to their table give John a nod like they know who he is. Sometimes kids talk to him in the halls, ask about Sherlock, ask him for advice or even sometimes for help. He’s been firmly established as Sherlock’s bloody sidekick, and though it should bug him, being someone’s _sidekick_ , John isn’t all that bothered.  He thinks again that there must be something wrong with him, and there’s definitely something wrong with Sherlock, so maybe the two of them together kind of fill each other out, or something. 

Christ, and that sounds sexier than it is; it isn’t sexy, of course it isn’t, they’re just friends.  Sherlock obviously isn’t interested at all in that sort of – sort of thing, and John isn’t – well – they’re friends, John’s pretty much definitely straight and they’re friends, so.

In February, the school’s quarterback (American football, bloody weird game that, but go Wildcats or whatever) asks Sherlock to get some photographs back for him.  Sherlock point blank refuses (“I don’t work for football players,” he tells John later, with a viciousness that is unexpected) but the quarterback approaches John in the hall to ask again, explain the case.  Apparently he was drunk at a party and someone took some less than savory photos of him on their phone, and has sent him several anonymous text messages alluding to this fact.  They don’t want any money, they don’t want anything yet, but he’s fucking panicking, and would Sherlock please consider it, he might be weird but everyone knows he’s smarter than shit, and you’re his friend or whatever, could you try, could you just try -

John isn’t much impressed by Dylan’s story, and feels the vague urge to kick him in the shins at the mention of ‘weird’, but he says he’ll see what he can do.  He tells Sherlock the details (in art class, no less, Sherlock concentrating intently on an experiment involving the consistency of various brands of oil paint).

 Sherlock sighs, pushing the dark hair out of his eyes.

“Fucking Irene.” He paints a brush stroke of ‘burnt ochre’ across the palm of his hand, and John is strangely transfixed, mustard yellow against white, pooling in his lifeline.  “Every five goddamned minutes.”

After school, John dumbly follows Sherlock out the back doors to this weird little alleyway between the school and the storage shed, where possibly the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen in his life is chain-smoking Newports like she’s going to live forever.

“Knew you’d get there eventually,” the girl says, not even looking at them. “Dylan fucking Moss.”  She has a face full of silver piercings, and a mouthful of bright red lipstick.  John suddenly has no idea what to do with his hands and clasps them awkwardly in front of himself.  Sherlock rolls his eyes.

“It did seem a bit – your style,” Sherlock says, “And John, for god’s sake, pull yourself together, she’s not going to bite you.”

The girl gives John a look from the corner of her only visible dark-lashed eye.

“I might,” she says, corner of her mouth twitching, before looking back at Sherlock.  “And what if I said I had nothing to do with it?”

“You’d be lying, obviously.  I’m assuming the pictures are sexual in nature?”

Again, the corner of her mouth twitches, like she wants to smile but won’t waste her own time.

“If you’d call ‘Dylan sucking off the wide-receiver’ sexual.”

John feels his eyes go wide, and the girl grins full-on.  “Oh my god, Sherlock, he’s adorable.” 

“Let’s try to focus here, Irene,” Sherlock says, darting his gaze between John and the girl – or Irene, as it were.   Irene stubs out her cigarette, and takes a few steps closer to them.

“John, is it?” she asks, and her teeth are very white and very sharp.

John nods, holds out his hand in an awkward, formal gesture that he instantly feels embarrassed by.

“He wants to shake my hand, Christ, where did you find him?”

“Irene –” Sherlock hisses, and Irene laughs, catching John’s eye and holding it.

“He’s very nervous, isn’t he?” Irene says to John, “Your boyfriend.”

“My friend,” John says quickly, “We aren’t – we’re not –”

“Of course, you’re not.” Irene smiles like a shark at a kitten, “Your loss.  He’s a surprisingly fantastic kisser.”

The record screech in John’s mind is so loud and vivid he is almost positive that everyone else can hear it.  It takes him a moment to go from the mental image of Sherlock kissing Irene to remembering how to breathe to suppressing the “Fucking what?” that threatens to spill out of his slack mouth.

“Irene,” Sherlock says again, and this time her name is a warning.  Irene turns her attention to Sherlock, and John feels immeasurable relief.

“Well, it’s true.  And I’m sorry it didn’t work out between us, you with the not-having-breasts and everything, but I was flattered –”

“Dylan wants the pictures,” Sherlock interrupts her, and John is happy that at least one of them can keep a somewhat level head around her.

“Dylan is a fucking homophobic asshat,” Irene tells him,  “You should see the shit he pulls around Claire and Yuna – like they can’t walk down the hall without him grabbing his dick and making some sort of bullshit comment. Not to mention Chris and Ian, and the shit he did to that freshman’s locker.”

“You should go to the principal,” John says, quickly, and Irene shoots him a look that almost burns him with scorn.

“Yeah, like they’re going to discipline our fucking quarterback.  No, I’m keeping the pictures, and if I hear the word ‘dyke’ or ‘fag’ come out of his mouth one more time, I’m going to show the whole school what else his mouth is good for.”

Sherlock scowls, but John feels a small smile cross his mouth.

“Yeah, all right.  Well done.”

Both Irene and Sherlock look at him with something like alarm.

“John –” Sherlock begins.

“Nah, she’s right, this bloke sound like a total prick. Just let her have the pictures, and let’s fuck off – I’m bloody freezing.”

 “You can tell Dylan that the pictures were simply untraceable.  Taken by a mastermind with an intellect that you couldn’t hope to compete with,” Irene says.  “Listen to your ‘just friend’, here.”

“I will fucking not.”

Irene looks from John to Sherlock and back again, mouth curling up at the corners.  Before John can even process what is happening, she has her phone out of her jacket, and takes a quick picture of the two of them.  She holds the phone away from her, admiring her work, before looking back up at Sherlock.

“I think you will, actually.  I really think you will.”

Sherlock leaves abruptly and in a huff, and John follows him, but not before Irene can give him a wink that makes him go a bit weak about the knees.  Later that night, Sherlock checks his email on John’s laptop (“Something from Irene.”) and John leans over him to see, but by that time Sherlock’s deleted the file and emptied the trash and shut off the computer.  He refuses to talk about it for the rest of the night.

*            *            *

This is the story of how Sherlock Holmes meets Irinjalakuda Adler. 

A gym teacher resigns after a picture is posted on his facebook wall, anonymously (Sherlock is in Grade 10.). The picture doesn’t show anything too graphic, but the girl in it cannot possibly be older than twenty, and the suspicion it casts is enough for the teacher to step down in order to avoid an investigation.

No one asks Sherlock to take the case, and he isn’t much bothered to come to the defense of child molesters, but he is – interested.  The police can’t seem to find the person who posted it, and they have asked him/her (Sherlock is willing to bet his two ring fingers it’s a ‘her’) to come forward if they have information, full protection and anonymity, etc., etc., lies, lies. Sherlock traces the post to a specific computer in a library across town, and from there he follows it through various users and encryptions and from there through the back doors of the school to the narrow little alley between the gym and the janitor’s shed where a girl is sitting cross-legged on the wet ground, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.

“What?” Irene spits at him.  She has a silver hoop through her nose and two through her lower lip (two years old and three months old, respectively.)

The school dress code expressly forbids any visible piercings, and Sherlock wonders how many teachers she has dirt on. The vice principal, at the very least.

He tells her he knows she posted the picture. He isn’t going to say anything to anyone else, but if she’s got more on Bell, if the man should be in jail, then she should come fucking forward.  He says all this, and Irene watches him, and instead of looking surprised or impressed or even mortified, she smiles.  She blows cigarette smoke in his face and walks away, and that night Sherlock finds the passwords changed to all six of his email accounts, and his blog basically gone without a trace (of course there is a trace, but it takes him a good three hours and four cups of coffee to set things to right again, and by the end of it all he is more than a bit pissed the fuck off.)

**Long night?** Irene texts him the next day, and Sherlock does not reply.

A week later, three more photos have been posted on Mr. Bell’s wall, and the man is taken in for questioning.

**Happy?** Irene texts Sherlock, and Sherlock does not reply. 

Four months later, the student council president comes to him (verge of tears) and tells him someone hacked her computer, and there are files missing, important university-application files, but more than that, there are _photos_ and no one can know, oh god –

Suffice to say, Sherlock finds himself in the same little alleyway with the same dark-haired girl five times that year (Irinjalakuda = town in India = grandfather’s birthplace) and each time he finds his email accounts hacked (twice, his fucking _phone_ , once, his bank account) and each time Irene Adler tosses her black hair, laughing at him and insinuating despicable things beneath her tobacco-scented breath.

The kiss is a blatant lie; she kisses _him_ , for fuck’s sake, it was certainly not the other way around, not under any circumstances, and there’s nothing else to say about it, the end.

*            *            *

_“There’s a fire, starting in my heart…”_

John wakes to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” and makes a mental note to punch Sherlock in the face when he sees him next.  He soon remembers that the object of his anger is only a few feet away, sleeping in a pile of blankets and pillows on the floor (“his nest” as Sherlock calls it) so John amends his mental note to ‘punch Sherlock in the face when I am awake enough to remember how my arms work.’

He scrabbles for his phone, and Adele is blessedly silent.

“Hello?”  John shoves the palm of his hand into one eye, willing it to open.

“Johnny?  ‘S Harry.”

Mothering bloody fuck.

“Harry?” He sits up in bed, pulling the phone away from his ear to glance briefly at the time.  Three in the morning - not a good sign. “Are you - okay?  What’s going on?”

“I’m fine, John, it’s fine, it’s all -” In the background John can hear loud voices and a slight blur of music.  Harry’s voice is brittle and much too high.  “I just - I don’t really know where I am.  I think I’m - I’m downtown and I - I can’t -”

She sounds like she’s got a bit more than alcohol in her system, and John feels Sherlock’s gaze on him suddenly, eyes keen and bird-bright.  Fuck, _Sherlock_ – there is absolutely no way that he needs to be here for this.

“You don’t know where you are?  Is there a street sign or -”

“I can’t get up right now - I have to stay lying down, I’m just going to stay on the sidewalk -”

John is so furious and terrified that the room swims around him.

“You can’t – the sidewalk, Harry, where the fuck are you?”

“I don’t kn-know, John, I was at a club and now I’m - “ She’s crying now, or close to it, and John wants to scream or punch something.

 “Give me the phone,” Sherlock says, quiet and intent from the floor.

“Sherlock, what -”

“Give me the phone.” His face is so serious, so absolutely calm, that John doesn’t question him a second time.  He hands the phone over, and watches dumbly as Sherlock squeezes his eyes shut, lifts one pale hand to rub his temple.  For a long moment, Sherlock is silent.  He furrows his brow.

“Harriet, I’m going to need you to be quiet for a minute.  No, this is not your brother.  No, more quiet than that.”

At last, Sherlock nods and hands the phone back.  “I know where she is.”

“You couldn’t possibly -”

“Let’s not waste valuable seconds having this conversation for the hundredth time.  I’m calling a cab.”

“Harry,” John says into his phone. When Sherlock is right, he’s right, and John decides to just go with it.  How many times does his friend have to astonish him before he’ll stop being astonished? “Can you just - not go anywhere?  Can you just stay where you are, okay, we’re coming to get you.  Don’t move, promise me.”

Harry laughs a bit manically.  “Don’t think I really could, at this - okay, okay, I’m just here, then.  Johnny, you are - you are such a good -”

John hangs up on her, and bites down hard on the inside of his cheek while he and Sherlock wait outside for the cab. 

“You don’t have to come,” he says, stupidly, wanting to fill the silence, the dark gaping chasm of his worry.  “This isn’t the ideal way to meet the family, I guess.  And it’s late, or early, and you’re probably done in -”

Sherlock scoffs, “You don’t even know where we’re going,” and John can’t really argue with that.

Sherlock tells the cabbie “The Lasso, on Hampton Street,” and they haven't gone four blocks before John breaks down and asks (he wants to stop thinking about Harry lying on the sidewalk, he wants Sherlock’s low voice in his ear making sense out of chaos.).  “All right, explain.”

 “What did you hear when you were on the phone with your sister?”

“Um.”  John doesn’t even have to think about it.  “I heard my bloody sister, pissed out of her skull, weeping and losing her shit.”

“Ah.”  Sherlock nods, as if this explains everything.  “That is where our observations differ.  I heard a bus pulling up, one of the night buses, and there’s a limited number of stops those buses make.  She said she’s downtown, which eliminates a number of options, and the music playing in the background was no doubt coming out of a club - this music was decidedly western in style, and there are three western-themed night clubs in the downtown core, two of which are located on the route of a night bus, but only one of which has karaoke on Saturdays - as evidenced by the single ring of audible microphone feedback.”

The cab driver gives Sherlock a concerned look in his rearview mirror, and John says “brilliant,” before he can help himself, the word rushing impulsively from his mouth.

Sherlock shrugs.  “Yes, well.”  

They sit in silence for a bit, John watching the buildings and headlights stream by. Sherlock doesn’t say anything, so John doesn’t say anything back, but holds the quiet comfort of his presence like a lantern. Eventually, though, the silence turns to the pulsing beat of worry, and John has to talk or else he’s going to start rocking back and forth in the seat.

“Got every pub’s karaoke schedule memorized, then?”

“It has -” Sherlock says, carefully considering each word, “proven useful in the past.”

“Explains why you get all the girls.”

Sherlock gives him a strange sharp look and then turns away, unsmiling.   John feels instantly regretful of his sarcastic little joke, and he opens his mouth to apologize just as the cab pulls up in front of their destination.

“Hey, listen -”

“Go find your sister,” Sherlock says quietly, "I'll hold the cab," and John nods, mutters a thank-you and goes.

The Lasso is the last seedy joint in a rapidly gentrifying area of downtown, and there are people milling about outside, smoking and fighting, but it doesn’t take long to find Harry.  She’s across the street, still lying on the sidewalk, and there are two girls standing over her, having a hushed conversation.  When John approaches, they look guiltily up at him, both of them swaying slightly in their stiletto heels.

“Don’t you - don’t you think about touchin’ her or anything,” the taller girl says, voice slurred with alcohol,  “She’s - we’re watchin’ over her.”

“I’m her brother,” John explains, kneeling beside Harry, who weakly blinks her eyes up at him, “I’m taking her home.”

“You don’ look like her brother,” the other girl says, and then starts to giggle.  “Hey, you’re English, that’s super hot -”

“John,” Harry laughs, and John helps her sit up slightly, “Wait, no, John, I’m really really not moving right now-”

“Well, you’re not going to spend the rest of the night on the sidewalk, so you’ll have to bloody well deal with it.”

Harry groans with fake anger, but slowly gets to her feet.  No sooner is she upright than she throws up all over John’s shoes, prompting the other two girls to shriek in disgust and take off.  John winces but pets Harry’s head, brushing her damp hair back until she spits and wipes her mouth and allows John to steer her toward the still-waiting cab.

Harry slides in beside Sherlock, and the cabbie’s nose wrinkles at the smell.

“We will give you an excellent tip, I swear to god,” John tells him, and he nods.  

“Where to?”

It’s at this point that John realizes he doesn’t know where Harry lives right now, doesn’t even know the names (let alone numbers) of any of her friends.  Sherlock looks from John to the cabbie and back again, and tersely gives the address of John’s residence.  John supposes it’s the best idea either of them have, and the driver pulls away, giant neon lasso and cactus sign fading fast behind them.

“Harry, love, are you - can you hear me?”

Harry grumbles sleepily and leans her head on Sherlock’s shoulder.  Sherlock gives John a look of utter alarm.

“Harry, now listen, do you think we -” John’s stomach clenches, suddenly nauseous,  “- should we go to the hospital, or -”

Harry says nothing, burrowing her face into the crook of Sherlock’s neck, and Sherlock sighs.  He takes Harry’s wrist in his hand, thumb pressing against her pulse.  He leans his face toward hers (John has this weird, mad thought that Sherlock is going to kiss his unconscious sister), before sniffing slightly and pulling away.

“She hasn’t been drugged,” he tells John.  “It’s just rum - and gin - and four to six appletinis.”

Sherlock drops Harry’s wrist and moves his hand swiftly over the back of her head.  

“She hasn’t hit her head,” he says, “She should be safe to sleep it off.”

“Oh god,” John gasps, releasing a breath he didn’t know he was holding, “Okay, thank god, yes, yes - let’s go home.”

They go home.

Sherlock helps John get Harry up the stairs and gets her settled in John’s bed, and then is gone, without a word.  Christ, maybe that comment of John’s was way over some invisible line, maybe Sherlock had his heart broken by some karaoke singing slag and the very mention of the incident is traumatic. John considers calling after him but it’s past four now and he doesn’t want his dorm-mates to hear him shouting Sherlock’s name in the middle of the night; it’d be on bloody Twitter by Monday.  So he lets Sherlock go, and contents himself with pouring Harry several glasses of water, arranging them by height on his night table.  He finds an empty box to put by the head of his bed – disgusting, but it will do in a pinch – and curls up in Sherlock’s nest, not even bothering to change. 

He lies there, and he lies there, and he does not sleep.  The blankets smell like Sherlock, for one thing, and John didn’t even think that Sherlock had a smell, not a distinctive one anyway, but he realizes now that he does.  It’s like something burning, but not that acrid smoky smell, more like fire itself - subtle and chemical and clean.  It makes John a bit light-headed, for some reason; he can’t relax.  Harry’s snoring softly in the bed behind him, but every so often her breath hitches and John thinks ‘Jesus Christ, she’s dying, she’s dying right now,’ and has to hold his breath until she takes her next one.

Aside from that, there is the matter of his bedroom window banging suddenly and violently open.

John sits bolt upright in his nest to see Sherlock climb inside, paper bag tucked under his arm.  Harry doesn’t stir, and Sherlock steps carefully over her to sit beside John on the floor.

“Are you going back to sleep?” he asks, and John shakes his head.  “Cool.”

Sherlock is armed with a thermos of coffee, several bottles of Gatorade, a box of crackers, an orange and an overwhelming amount of candy.

“I just thought of what I might want if I was blindingly hungover,” he explains.  John laughs, and Sherlock makes that strange, delighted face he gets whenever John finds him amusing in the slightest.  “Oh, but the coffee’s for me.  Us.  And the candy.”

“Um.  Wow.  Thanks.  I thought you had - gone, because you were angry or - something.”  John pauses, winces slightly.  “Look, about that thing I said, the thing that you -”

“What thing is that?” Sherlock asks, biting the head off some sort of gummy worm, and not fooling anyone.

“About the girls and that – you seemed kind of pissed off about it -”

Sherlock regards him very carefully, which would be intimidating were it not for the gummy worm still hanging out of his mouth.  “I - no, it’s.  Nothing.  Just delete it.”

John nods, and grabs a handful of the gummy worms to fill the silence.  They are not particularly terrible, but deserve nowhere near the enthusiasm Sherlock is inclined to show. 

“You want to watch Transformers II on my laptop?”

“Those are the worst movies in this history of - yes, yes of course I do, but they’re complete shit, you know that.”

“Yeah, but like – Megan Fox.”

“Oh, for god’s sake.”

John laughs, and Sherlock looks insanely pleased, and Harry snores softly behind them, so that’s okay then.  As the movie progresses, however, John feels like he didn’t maybe handle things correctly, that maybe he dropped the issue too early, and he has a faint idea in his head, but.  But to say it out loud, and be wrong, or cause offense – he doesn’t know how to proceed, the way is slick with frozen rain.  Eventually he opens his mouth and just says it, fuck his life.

“The whole - the girls thing, is it - is it - not.”  He ends it there, though he’s certain he doesn’t make an ounce of sense, but if anyone can puzzle meaning out of idiocy, it’s Sherlock Holmes. John glances away from Shia LaBoeuf stammering on-screen to see colour flush along Sherlock’s cheekbones. 

“Oh,” John says, and Sherlock says nothing.  “Okay.” 

Sherlock still says nothing, and John thinks he’s going about this terribly, that this is quite possibly a Significant Moment and Sherlock just basically rescued his sister, so he deserves - he deserves something.  It isn’t like anything would change if Sherlock was - was gay, or anything.  One of John’s best mates back home was gay as Christmas, and John – well, John messed about with Ciaran once (admittedly stoned at the time, and just kissing, but whatever).

He can’t believe he’s having this conversation over bloody Transformers.

“So you’re - are you -”

“I’m not anything,” Sherlock says quickly, and he’s suddenly stopped eating candy, which is a bad sign. 

“You’re not anything,” John says slowly, and Sherlock makes a choked, frustrated sound under his breath.

“I don’t have - I’m not interested in that sort of - the work is what I have, what I do.” Sherlock clenches his white hands into fists on his lap.  “I don’t – I know, it’s fucked up.  It’s me, I’m just -”

“ _No_ ,” John says hotly, because the more Sherlock speaks, the more upset he seems to get, and John can’t stand it.  It physically hurts him to see Sherlock - brilliant, articulate, acerbic - stammering into his hands like he’s committed a crime.  “ _No_ , it’s not, _you’re not_ , it’s fine.  It’s all fine, Sherlock, hell – whatever works.  I don’t care, I -”

Sherlock looks up at him, eyes wide and suddenly clear. John reaches out to touch his shoulder, awkwardly convinced that’s the right thing to do (and also because he can’t help it, because he _wants to_ ). The moment he makes contact Sherlock flinches and John pulls away, mortified, doesn’t know what to say or where to look.

“Sorry, sorry, I’m -” Sherlock says quickly, “I’m not -”

“No, I shouldn’t have -”

“It’s fine,” Sherlock says.  There is a short and painful silence, and Sherlock attempts a sad little smile that John feels all along the roof of his mouth, like a burn. “I just - I’m not used to it.  So.”

“Ah.”

“But you can.  I don’t mind it so much.  When it’s - when it’s you.”

“Right.”

“Becausewe’refriends,” Sherlock finishes in a rush, and John’s heart makes an uncomfortable little lurch inside his chest, and instead of saying what he wants to say (“yes, okay, and also for the record you’re maybe possibly the best friend I’ve ever had, and you rescued my sister, and you brought her crackers, and you brought me candy, and I think you’re bloody marvelous –”), John sighs, and laughs softly.

“These movies really are terrible.”

“I told you, I fucking told you,” Sherlock says, and starts back on the sour candies, and John thinks that things might be okay, they just might.

John doesn’t remember falling asleep, but when he wakes up, Sherlock is gone (as is the candy, bastard) and Harry is just beginning to stir.  John’s neck hurts, and his room smells like a liquor store (his sister no doubt excreting Appletinis through her pores) and he and Harry are going to have Words but not yet, not yet.  He feels strangely warm all over, from his hands to his neck to the tips of his ears, and his blankets smell like Sherlock, chemical and clean and holy shit: his best bloody friend.

*            *            *

In March, John is kidnapped (by a beautiful woman in an expensive car, so silver linings and all that).  In hindsight, he shouldn’t have been out running; it’s pouring rain, and his physician has told him not to (swimming yes, running on hard pavement, hell-to-the-no) but sometimes John misses being physical, he misses being able to do the things he used to do.  Sometimes he has a brief, irrational and sudden thought that things will be easy this time, that he’s only out of practice. The next few days, when his leg aches and he has to mainline pain-killers, are always good for clearing up his illusions.

So. John is out running and kidnapped by a woman (well, he himself chooses to get in the car, and what he thought was a gun on her belt turns out to be a pager, but still _kidnapped_ , he’s sticking with kidnapped).

Strangely enough, the woman delivers him to a rather bustling restaurant, large windows spilling warm light out into the street.  It is crammed with patrons, tiny tables nearly stacked on top of each other, and John looks at the strange woman, utterly confused. 

“In there,” she says, with a jerk of her head.

“Who – what’s in there?”

“They’ll get you a table, and he’ll find you.”

“Who will find me?” John asks, and the woman gives John a look that says a million disparaging things about his intelligence all at once.

“I’ll wait in the car for you,” she tells him, instead of answering, “It won’t take a minute, I’m sure.”

It’s a bit embarrassing to hear that your potential interrogation and/or torture and/or murder ‘won’t take a minute,’ but John grits his teeth and leaves the car.   It later occurs to him that he could have just run for it, but he’s a bit curious at this point.  A slender, harried-looking waiter finds him a seat at a tiny wooden table, lights a candle and leaves him with a menu (the contents of which cost more than the last five meals John's eaten combined).  He takes a sip from his glass of ice-water, glances dizzily at the menu, and waits.  Eventually, he takes his phone from his jacket pocket, about to text Sherlock and demand some answers (he isn’t an idiot; of course this is about Sherlock), and as he does so someone clears their throat at the table beside him.

John looks up, but the tallish, hawk-faced man is staring down at his menu, seemingly unconcerned.  John turns back to his phone.

"Do not, under any circumstances, look up again."

John looks up immediately, then wrenches his eyes back down, focusing on his water glass, the table top, the immaculate silverware - "Sorry, sorry.  It’s hard to - just force of habit, you - "

"For God's sake," the man says, very softly, "Fine, fine, shut up."

John waits for more, but nothing is forthcoming.  "You want to tell me what this is all about?" he asks, trying to move his lips as slightly as possible. "Is this really necessary, I mean -"

"It has come to my attention that you are - spending time - as of late, with one Sherlock Holmes, is this correct?" The man speaks as if everything is one long, well-oiled sentence, his words curling snake-like around the legs of John's table.

"I don't - really see how that's any of your - "

"Mr. Watson, I cannot impress upon you enough how very much my business this is, what exactly is your relationship with Sherlock Holmes?"

"Friends," he decides, which is the truth, and at the same time a pale and inconstant word, "We're friends."

"Friends," the older man repeats, and John doesn't need to look up to see the sneer on his lips, "How delightfully heart-warming."

John lowers his phone to his lap and types **Kidnapped** , very carefully not looking at his hands.

"Send that text and there will be significant consequences," the soft voice at his side says, and John does not send it, but does not put the phone away.

"I'm sorry, is there something else you need?"

"What if I told you that I would pay you a large amount of money to report on the - shall we say - activities of Mr. Holmes, nothing substantial on your part, the odd weekly report -"

"I would say absolutely bloody not," John cuts in, but the man continues.

"So certain of that?  Where is dear Harriet living presently, John, or do you know?  Wouldn't it be brotherly of you to help her pay her rent, get her settled in a - no, do not think about looking up - "

"One more word about my fucking sister and I'm out the door, I swear to fucking god.  How do you even know about -" John stammers, but he does not look up, nor does he sock this bloke in the eye, so well done him.

"I know everything about you, John Watson," the man says, and John feels a sick chill run up his back. "It is in my best interests - shall we say - to know about the mere mortals with whom Sherlock deigns to share his time, now, are you certain you won't reconsider my generous offer?"

"Go fuck yourself," John says, heat flooding his face, "I'm not a fucking spy.  Are we finished?" 

"Not quite." John hears a long, drawn out sip of water, and the clink of a glass as it is set back down on a table.  "Disappointed though I may be - in your misguided loyalty, for one, not to mention your less than sophisticated vocabulary - I have been instructed to invite you to dinner."

John says nothing.  He wraps his head around the words.

"I'm - sorry?"

"Sherlock does not have many close acquaintances; Mother was quite insistent that we make yours personally."

John looks up immediately, and the man widens his eyes and makes furious gestures with his hands until John looks back down, but not before he sees it - the same long neck and pale skin, the grey eyes (slightly smaller), the sharp features -

"One request, I said don't look up, that's it, that's all, is it so hard, is it really -"

"Sorry," John says quickly.

"Fine, yes, okay," the older man says, breathing deeply, "I'll be in touch when I am able to clear my schedule, a Sunday evening, I should think, I trust there are no objections, a pleasure."

The man rises and leaves, and John sits there, staring at the table, feeling the need to catch his breath.  He picks up his phone again, considering.

Mother was quite insistent - oh dear god.

He amends his text message to **Kidnapped by your FUCKING BROTHER** and sends it.  He doesn't even wait ten seconds before a message shows up in his inbox.

**Coming immediately where are you ARE YOU OK???? Does he know you sent this message don’t touch your face with your hands too much its too obvious for god’s sake don’t say yes to dinner.  SH**

John rolls his eyes, leaving the restaurant and bracing himself against the blowing rain.  The car is still waiting for him, and John gets in, trying unsuccessfully to ignore the slightly pitying smirk of the driver. 

**On my way home, yes, prob, wtf, too late.  JW**

He doesn’t realize that he never told the woman his address, until they are almost back at his residence, and at that point he’s beyond surprise, really.  Just as he’s going up the front steps of the building, Sherlock sends a reply.

**God damn it.  SH**

Really - John couldn't agree more.

*            *            *

Dinner with the Holmes family goes – as one might expect.

John changes his clothing six times, with little success.  All his sweaters were attacked by moths sometime over Christmas, and the rest of his wardrobe is mostly old jumpers that seem suddenly offensively casual.

Sherlock lies disinterestedly on the bed, eventually chucking a pillow at John in disgust.

“It’s not a date, for god’s sake,” he says, then eyes John’s navy button-up critically while John’s heart restarts itself. “Although maybe the green one was better.  Mother never cared for blue.”

John changes, and physically wrestles the joint from Sherlock’s fingers before he can light it (“You’re not allowed to get high without me, and I am not going to meet your parents stoned, Sherlock, I’ll break your fingers if I have to, Jesus -“).

Mycroft picks them up in a ridiculously expensive car, and makes them both sit in the back seat, like they're being taken somewhere to be eliminated. Mycroft and Sherlock say nothing to each other, and awkward fucking silence is always fun.  The houses get progressively larger and more posh, and John bounces his leg up and down until Sherlock elbows him in the ribs.  Sherlock’s elbows ought to be illegal, ought to be considered concealed weapons, and it stops John’s twitching well enough.

Eventually they get to some monster of a house, all huge bay windows and oak double doors and pillars – honest to god, fucking pillars. It looks a bit like a small hotel, but neither Sherlock nor Mycroft seem at all bothered or impressed by it, so John does his best to keep his mouth shut, and not gape too much like a landed fish.

“Cheers for the lift,” he tells Mycroft who rolls his eyes (John glances over at Sherlock to see a mirrored expression on his face) and they climb the massive stone front steps into Sherlock’s goddamned mansion.

The interior is every bit as intimidating. John follows the Holmes brothers through the high-ceilinged entrance, white walls covered with large, rather jarring works of art.  They sit in a large living room of some kind – fireplace, leather couches, same huge, abstract paintings.  Mycroft leaves them abruptly, and returns with small tumblers of some exceptionally strong alcohol.  John sips his and winces, coughs, while both Sherlock and Mycroft gaze at him critically. Again there is silence; Sherlock seems furious just to be in Mycroft’s presence, and John is so dumbstruck by the lack of Sherlock’s rapid-fire, contemptuous monologue that he can’t for the life of him think up any polite conversation.

Mycroft doesn’t seem bothered, eventually fetching his briefcase and removing a series of files in which Sherlock feigns disinterest (but John sees his sideways glances, again and again, always the bloody detective).

A stocky, middle-aged woman enters from the hallway, and John rises to his feet, hand outstretched (“It’s a pleasure –“) before Sherlock jerks him roughly back down to the couch.

“Dinner is ready, Mr. Holmes,” the woman says, paying no attention at all to John, and Sherlock hisses, “Housekeeper,” under his breath, like everyone has a housekeeper who makes them dinner, like it’s not totally posh or batshit insane.

“Shall we adjourn to the dining room?” Mycroft asks, smile slim and insincere across his mouth, and Sherlock nods sharply.

So they _adjourn_ to the dining room, a high-ceilinged room with a long oak table, over which hangs some sort of modern-art chandelier.  The table is set, the candles are lit, and each setting has a huge glass of red wine already poured.  Whatever they had before dinner is already going to John’s head, and he isn’t sure how much more he’ll be able to drink without abandoning conversation entirely.  He and Sherlock sit side by side across the table from Mycroft, and it doesn’t escape John’s notice that there is a place setting that still sits empty.  The housekeeper brings out a plate that looks as if it’s from an impossibly expensive restaurant: thinly sliced salmon with some sort of dill sauce, three baby carrots, a handful of something green – John’s already making plans for late night take-out, when a tall, severe looking woman enters the dining room.  Both Mycroft and Sherlock stand up, so John does the same, and the woman nods distractedly at the three of them before taking a seat.

John sits back down, suddenly feeling as if there isn’t alcohol enough in the world for the rest of this evening. He takes a proprietary sip of his wine, and then three more, while the woman who must be Mrs. Holmes murmurs something indecipherable in Mycroft’s ear, then turns her dark gaze to John.  It’s like a snake striking, like a jolt of electricity. She looks so much like Sherlock it’s uncanny, and John swallows and forgets how to use cutlery.

“John Watson, is it?” she asks, and John does nothing until the silence becomes stretched and uncomfortable, and he remembers to nod. “Sherlock has told us all so much about you.”

She has one of those posh, American accents that you hear in old black-and-white movies, like she should be an upstart female reporter or a mad heiress or Katherine Hepburn or something.

“Has he?” John manages, with a quick look at Sherlock. “Well.”

“He talks of little else,” Mrs. Holmes continues, and John sees Sherlock go very carefully still beside him.  “British, soccer injury, military casualty – I feel as if I know you quite well.”

“Mother –” Sherlock says with a voice like flint.

“Excellent lemon dill on the salmon,” Mycroft interrupts, “I shall have to tell Mrs. Bird.”

“It is – it is very good, yeah,” John says, willing the conversation away from its previous potential direction.

“I suppose I should say ‘football’ rather than soccer,” Mrs. Holmes murmurs absently.  “My late grandfather was British.  Deplorable man.”

John swallows hard around a mouthful of carrot, and Mrs. Holmes turns to pleasantries – the weather, his classes, Sherlock’s grades.  They talk briefly about John’s plans after graduation (“Medicine, maybe,” John says, and Sherlock looks over at him with a curl on his fine lips), how he’s liking the city, how he’s missing England. 

Mrs. Bird comes in to clear the dishes, and returns with four tiny glasses of cordial.

“And what about recreational drugs?” Mrs. Holmes asks, before the housekeeper has even cleared the doorway.

Mycroft stares at his plate, and Mrs. Bird moves silently out of the room. Sherlock, meanwhile, stands up like an exclamation mark, body lit with outrage.

“Uh – no –“ John begins. “I don’t –”

“Would you be willing to roll up your sleeves?” Mrs. Holmes asks, voice shaking slightly, and Sherlock says, “No, he would fucking not,” and Mycroft growls, “You watch your language,” and Sherlock turns on his heel, striding from the room.  John hears his footfalls on the stairs and the distant slam of a door, before he turns his horrified eyes back to Sherlock’s mother.

“Mr. Watson?” Mrs. Holmes says, expectantly, as if nothing unpleasant has happened.  “I believe I made a request.”

John wets his lips.  Mycroft is looking at him fiercely, like at any moment he might spontaneously combust.  Slowly, John undoes the buttons at his cuffs.  He rolls up first his left sleeve, then his right, exposing pale skin, criss-crossed with blue veins.

Mrs. Holmes nods, biting down on her lips. She lifts a white hand to briefly cover her eyes, then her mouth, then drop weakly to the table.

“I’m – my apologies, I – “

There is a long, finely drawn silence. Mrs. Holmes takes a quick sip of wine, mouth trembling, before she rises.  If John thought that she looked like Sherlock before, the resemblance was nowhere as strong as it is now, arrogance and brilliance encased in cracking china. 

She forces a tight smile.  “I’m a bit out of – a bit tired, this evening. You’ll forgive me, Mr. Watson, if I retire.  It was, of course, a pleasure to meet you.  I – I am - “

She gives up, shaking her head slightly before following Sherlock out of the dining room.   John and his host awkwardly study the tablecloth. It’s going much worse than John predicted, but really, he couldn’t have predicted this.

“Another typical evening at the Holmes residence,” Mycroft says quietly, not looking up.  “My mother suffers from anxiety, Mr. Watson.  It has not been easy for her, as you can imagine.”

John shakes his head, because – no, what the hell is going on here?  Sally Donovan’s voice fills his ears once again (“OD’d or something in the chem lab, the cops had to come”), and there is a great wrenching motion from somewhere inside his chest.  If John was more poetic, he would say his heart was breaking, because Sally couldn’t have been – she couldn’t have been telling the truth –

“He hasn’t told you.” Mycroft still does not look up. “That is – something I had not anticipated.”

“Told me what?” John asks, intent.

“As you and Sherlock have become so – close, as it were, I feel it is only reasonable that Mother should be curious about your lifestyle choices, it wouldn’t do to have Sherlock under the influence of less than savory –”

“Told me what?” John asks again, hand tightening around his wine glass.

“One has every right to be protective of one’s family, and Sherlock’s hardly demonstrated the best decision making abilities –”

“ _Christ’s sake_ , Mycroft.” John stands, patience finally gone.  “What hasn’t he told me?  What is he, like, a drug addict or –”

“Yes,” Mycroft says simply, and John sits back down as if his strings have been cut.

He waits a moment before replying.

“He’s not, though.  He’s –” John stops himself.  He’s never seen Sherlock do anything more criminal than pot and a bit of underage drinking; surely if there was something going on, John would have noticed by now.  They spend almost every bloody moment together; how could Sherlock possibly hide anything that significant?

“He’s not,” John finishes, weakly convinced by his own reasoning.  “I know he’s not. Maybe he was before but –”

“You presume that you could tell me something about my brother I do not already know?  How counter-intuitive.” Mycroft presses his lips together, a parody of a smile. “Yes, I am aware he is – shall we say – clean, at present.  I endeavour to keep it that way.”

John suddenly remembers a day after school where Lestrade and Sherlock had a very intent and hushed argument in the vicinity of Sherlock’s locker, and Sherlock was unbearable for a good three days after.  Jesus. Jesus Christ.  Well, this is certainly a conversation that they’ll be having in the near future.  John refuses to get information about his best friend from Sally bloody Donovan. 

“He is twelve years younger than me, and though he was doubtless unexpected by my parents, he is – he is infinitely precious to my mother,” Mycroft says after a moment, tracing the rim of his wine glass “I cannot stress enough the depth of her – esteem, her –“

He trails off, and John thinks that it isn’t quite envy in Mycroft’s voice, more like – longing, futile and hopeless.

“I would never let anything happen to him,” John says, keeping his eyes down in embarrassment at the truth of his admission.   “I swear to god. I can’t imagine anything – anything worse.”

When John finally looks up, Mycroft is studying him strangely – a bit like Sherlock but not quite.  With Sherlock you know you’re being read for detail ( _the easier to deduce you with, my dear_ ) but Mycroft is wolfish in a different way.  His gaze is decidedly appraising, like he’s deciding what purpose you might have that could be put to greatest use.

“My brother’s room is up the stairs, third door on the left,” Mycroft says, rather than reveal his conclusions. “Do be careful Mr. Watson.”

Like John would be anything else.

He climbs the hardwood stairs to the second floor slowly, studying the black and white framed photographs decorating the walls. Some are obviously grandparents and great-grandparents, and there are a couple of Mrs. Holmes and another tall, dark-haired man: Mr. Holmes, maybe?  Sherlock never mentioned an absent father, but maybe it’s a sore point in the family.  It makes John a bit angry, being here, because he’s gradually realizing that he barely knows Sherlock at all.  Sure, he _knows him_ , they’re basically inseparable, but there’s this whole other world behind Sherlock’s hard skull that it seems everyone is privy to but John.  John, who follows him around like a lost dog, chases him up the stairs after being unceremoniously abandoned at dinner. It’s ridiculous. It’s pathetic.

John is working himself up to go back down the stairs and take the closest bus home, when another photo catches his eye. It’s Sherlock and Mycroft as children; Sherlock looks to be about five or six, though his expression is just as deadly serious as it is now.  He’s sitting on a horse, looking a complete prat, and Mycroft is standing beside him – what would he be?  Sixteen? He seems almost completely unchanged, except perhaps for a bit of weight around the chin.  The look in Sherlock’s eyes, though, is completely heartbreaking; he’s glancing down at Mycroft, and though his mouth is flat and serious, there is a shine of absolute adoration in his grey eyes, a great and terrible love.  John knows there are pictures of himself looking up at Harry like that, embarrassing the hell out of his older sister at parties or family dinners, and he thinks: _I know you._

_I know exactly who you are._

He finishes climbing the stairs and knocks on Sherlock’s door.  Sherlock shouts, “Go away” (so bloody dramatic), but the door creaks open just the same.  As John enters, Sherlock turns away and flops down on his bed, and John – previously full of Things To Say, gets instantly lost in Sherlock’s room.  It’s huge for one, a good three times the size of John’s pathetic little dormitory, with a window that you can see the mountains from. There is a sodding flat screen television mounted on the wall across from the bed, and a record player balanced precariously on two uneven stacks of textbooks. The walls look – well, a bit like a serial killer’s: newspaper clippings tacked up beside anatomy drawings, maps drawn in charcoal on the white paint, even one of those ceramic fish-tank skulls sitting on the bookshelf.   Sherlock rolls over on his side, facing away from John, so John ignores him and examines his library, and really, that’s the only word for it; he must have upwards of three hundred books, some which look more than one hundred years old and couldn’t possibly be helpful in terms of fact finding.

One patch of wall is suspiciously empty, despite its numerous thumbtack holes, and John spies a pile of thumbtacks on Sherlock’s polished teak desk, along with – ribbons?  He picks them up, rummaging through them, and as he does Sherlock rolls back over, alarmed.

“Don’t –“

“First place?” John asks, “Best Sonata? Best –“

“Give those here,” Sherlock demands, getting out of bed only to snatch the ribbons from John’s hands (but not before John can see the violin etched across one of them in fine gold thread).  Sherlock stuffs the ribbons under his pillow, and John sits down, cross-legged on the floor.

“You – you’re a violinist?” he asks, and Sherlock snorts and does not answer.

“A good one, I guess, judging from those.” Still Sherlock says nothing. “Is this my cue to leave, then?”

Sherlock scowls, but finally seems to register his presence.  “John. I must – I feel I must apologize for my mother.  She is – ”

“It’s not your mum you have to apologize for,” John cuts in, “You don’t leave a mate alone with your parents after you invite him for dinner, it’s just – not on.  More than a bit awkward.”

Sherlock darts a glance up at him, and John sees something flicker in his eyes – apology?  Annoyance?  It’s never easy with Sherlock.  John clears his throat, and asks another question he’d happily avoid.

“Where’s your dad at, then?  You never said.”  He licks his lips.  “He – um, busy or –”

“He’s in the government,” Sherlock says quickly, but it doesn’t escape John’s notice that his lips have gone very white, “My mother was too, that’s how they met, and Mycroft fancies himself the next Robert Mueller, as you’re doubtlessly aware.”

John doesn’t actually know who ‘Robert Mueller’ is, and makes a mental note to google him later.

 “My dad travels a lot,” Sherlock finishes eventually, “He doesn’t – technically - live here anymore, he’s overseas and it’s – it’s easier.  For him.  For everyone, I guess.”

John nods.  He wants to ask why Sherlock didn’t tell him, but he doesn’t.  He thinks back to that photograph in the hallway, and wishes he had taken a picture of it on his phone.

“So – violin, eh?  Will you play something?”

“Is it that funny?” Sherlock snaps, and John shakes his head.

“No, I – no.  I think it’s brilliant.” 

Sherlock snorts, studying his (surprisingly quaint) patchwork bedspread.  “You said the same thing about frog dissection.”

“Well, yeah – that was brilliant too.”

“You can’t think everything I do is –”

“Yes, I can,” John interrupts, mouth going dry the moment he realizes what he’s just said. 

Sherlock says nothing for a long moment, still looking down at his bedspread, and John doesn’t know what to do to fill the silence. It’s like he’s a child once again, feeling with no filter, completely out of bloody control. He’s got to scale it back, not be so damn impressed and affectionate, got to rein it in –

Then Sherlock glances up at him, lips parted slightly, and it all goes out the window because John thinks: _I want to kiss you_ , as clear in his mind as if he said it out loud.

He flinches and presses a hand to his mouth to ensure that no such words ever _ever_ come out of it, and Sherlock’s eyes go wide with alarm.

“What is it?  What’s –”

“Nothing,” John says quickly, it’s the wine, it’s clearly the wine, “Just – a headache.  It’s fine.”

“A headache,” Sherlock repeats.

“Yes.  Sudden.”

 “Would you like a – paracetemol or –”

“No, it’s fine,” John says, perhaps a bit too forcefully. They look at each other, and John’s heart is hammering in his ears, and it’s the wine, it has to be, the wine that’s making Sherlock’s throat, Sherlock’s fluttering pulse point, so utterly fascinating.  John opens his mouth helplessly, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to say, but it’s going to be awful, and he can’t can’t stop -

“Do you want to play Wii _Mario Kart_?” Sherlock asks.

John is jarred back to reality.

“Um – “

“Gift from Mycroft.  Trying to socialize me.” 

“Um.” John is still having difficulties. “ _Mario Kart_?”

“Well, it’s either that, _Call of Duty_ or _Medal of Honour_ , and I eliminated those for obvious reasons.”

“Oh – yeah, well done,” John says, after he recovers from a brief flash of charred metal and a wide and endless desert. “Not really – into those. But _Mario Kart_ is okay.”

“Right,” Sherlock nods, and then throws himself over the edge of his bed, rummaging around beneath it, “You’ll have to help me assemble the Wii, it’s all still in the packaging.”

John laughs at this, he can’t help it, and Sherlock looks blankly at him until he grins and it is – fine.  It will be fine.   

They lean against Sherlock’s bed, and the Wii blares to life, and John thinks that he does _not_ want to kiss Sherlock, of course he doesn’t.   It was some random synapse malfunction, and they’re friends, and that’s all there is to it.

A few hours later, Mycroft gives John a ride home.   It feels weird to leave Sherlock in the doorway of his house, one hand raised in a wave and silhouetted against yellow light.  It takes John a moment to remember that Sherlock doesn’t actually live with him; he has his own posh house and obscene electronic set up, and John has his room in residence and that’s the way things are.

Still, that night John’s room feels huge and empty. He goes on his laptop for a bit, but Sherlock’s left his traces everywhere online and off.  He’s still logged into facebook (how the hell does Sherlock Holmes have over a thousand friends?)  and John scrolls briefly through Sherlock’s strange and mostly indecipherable updates.  There are two wall posts from someone named M. Arty that make even less sense (random pictures of the city, strange abbreviations and half-formed words) and John feels some sort of heat in the vicinity of his chest. It isn’t jealousy.

John closes his laptop, puts his headphones in, and blares _The National_ until it’s rolling heavier than alcohol in his bloodstream.   He pulls open his blinds and watches the electric slide of traffic in the distant city.

He does not want to kiss his best friend. His best friend who may or may not be a drug addict.

He does not.

_“Turn the lights out, say goodnight_

_No thinking for a little while,_

_Let’s not try to figure out everything at once…”_

When he finally falls asleep, his dreams are foggy and familiar: pale hands and dark hair (a stranger, John tells himself the next morning).

_“It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky.”_

A stranger leans over him, whispers calculus equations and song lyrics in his ear.


	4. Live in This City

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another warning for substance use, suicidal ideation and homophobia. But don't let that scare you away, it's mostly a lot of teenage pining. (Although maybe that deserves a warning too.)

This is the story of Sherlock's last overdose.            

He tells John, and he has never told anyone, so this must be significant.  Sherlock has read about sharing in relationships, how communication is pivotal, but sometimes he tells John things that make John scowl or widen his eyes to 108.2% of their original size and Sherlock does not like when these things happen (pure operant conditioning, hideous and beneath him), so perhaps communication is not as mutually beneficial as the self-help manuals would have you believe.  Or perhaps, as John seems to think, communication needs to happen within reason - you disclose some things but not others.  For example, Sherlock could tell John that he missed him while he was at his mother's over Christmas, but not that he broke into John's room and cut a few small squares from each of John's favourite sweaters so that he could determine whether the chemical make-up of the polyester/wool blend directly related to Sherlock's desire to tug on the sleeves and pull on the collar while John was wearing them. 

Results: inconclusive ("How were your holidays, then?" John asks and Sherlock says "I _missed_ you," in the same tone that he would use to say "you murdered my family," and John's eyes go wide and very blue, so blue it's unreasonable.)

Anyway, Sherlock steps lightly around what he tells John and what he doesn't, but they've gone to the beach, passing back and forth a thermos of wine (stolen from Sherlock’s mother) and John asks about the overdose.

After the hideous disaster that was dinner with the family, Sherlock cannot say he wasn’t expecting this.

"It's not true, is it?  I mean, why would you – you’re so smart, and -"

It’s the stuff of urban legend at Tupper, just like Sherlock's numerous murder charges (inaccurate) and lengthy periods of institutionalization (exaggerated). 

"It's true," Sherlock says quietly.

The ocean stretches out before them, a blurry and imperfect reflection of the night sky above.  It is cold, a good twelve degrees below the March average, but John's shoulder is resting just lightly against Sherlock's, and that point of contact runs like scalding water, however illogically, through Sherlock's whole body.  He feels overheated even, like he should take off his scarf and unbutton his collar (he does not, because that would mean moving his arm, and then he would not be touching John, and that would be unacceptable, on every level, unacceptable.).

Sherlock was in Grade 9 and he was in the second floor chem lab (starched white shirt, perfectly pressed trousers, bottle of Oxycodone, striped blue tie). 

It was not the first time.  Well, it was the first time with Oxycodone.  In Grade 7 it had been tylenol (dull) and in Grade 8 it had been morphine and two weeks in the children's psychiatric ward.   Grade 9 was of substantially more consequence; Sherlock was hospitalized for over a month, attended substance abuse classes - even briefly railroaded into psychiatric counseling (for the three months it took to get his psychiatrist to leave the city and take up bee-keeping). 

Sherlock can look back on those times with a curious disinterest, detachment, but after he tells John he can feel his friend shaking slightly, and it takes Sherlock a moment to realize John is crying.

Silently, John cries silently (Sherlock files this information away with his dragon’s hoard of information about John: width of ears, sensitivity to cold, quality of vision, preferred blend of black tea).

“Why would you – why –” John manages, voice only cracking slightly.

Sherlock can visually take apart and reassemble the bones of the human hand, but cannot think of a way to make John stop crying. Neither can he explain his past in a way that John will understand; sometimes it is like the two of them speak a different language, and John is in no fit state for translation.

He tries to explain that he didn’t want to die in Grade 9, not at all.  He was certain he could slow down his heartbeat to the appropriate level and still maintain perfect clarity. 

Being found in his own shit, blue and barely breathing did not factor at all into his brilliant and well-reasoned plan.

He tries to explain that Grade 7 had been boredom, and Grade 8 had been exhaustion - the data, the details weighing on him like a shipping anchor, _everything_ about _everyone_ at _every_ _moment_ , so loud and sharp and ringing in his ears and he had just wanted silence, just a moment of it, just one fucking moment, for God’s fucking sake -

The last time was a mistake, however; he’d been using for months (it made the details easier to bear, slowed them down like honey) but he hadn’t meant to go that far.  It was an accident.  And Sherlock doesn’t have accidents, doesn’t make mistakes, so once they pumped his stomach and gave him back his clothing privileges (psych ward pajamas are a cruel and unusual form of punishment, and he will never believe otherwise) that was pretty much it for the opioids.

“You fucking – lunatic, you –” John stammers, but he’s stopped crying.  At least, his crying has evolved into some sort of weak and panicked laughter, so that has to be better, _it has to_ , but it still make uncomfortable things happen in the vicinity of Sherlock’s chest.

“I won’t – I haven’t – ” Sherlock starts to say, but he doesn’t know how to finish.  

“Don’t fucking do it again, right? You’re not – you’re not allowed to.”

“I told you, I’m sober as a –“

“Easy for you to say, sitting here getting pissed on Merlot.”

Sherlock snorts.  “It’s a Shiraz, John.  Honestly.”

John laughs, and Sherlock feels like tilting his head back and closing his eyes, victorious.  For a moment, the only sound is his thrumming pulse and the dull crash of waves against the shore, wind picking up from the East.

A storm is coming.

“Just - stick around, yeah?” John says, breaking the silence.  Sherlock turns to look at him, and suddenly their faces are very close together.

At the juncture between jaw and neck, Sherlock can see John’s pulse fluttering like a moth beneath his skin (102 BPM, nothing serious, but on the high side of normal). 

There are 12.3 inches separating the tips of their noses, and in his mind Sherlock thinks _yes_ then YES in capital letters.  He won’t say it out loud, only jerks a sharp nod in John’s direction, but he can think it, hold it in the marrow of his humerus or tibia, hold it in a pulse that beats out yes yes yes at 115 beats per minute.

“I wouldn’t – ” John says, “ _It_ wouldn’t be as much – fun, without you. So just don’t – go anywhere.”

“I won’t,” say Sherlock, and for the moment, as least, he means it.

*            *            *

John spends a good part of the Easter long weekend locked in a stranger’s toilet, at which point he realizes he is a bigger idiot than he ever anticipated. So that’s something.

His blurry eyes just register _tiles_ , at first (miles and miles and miles) and then _pain_.  He realizes he is lying flat on his back, head slumped against sticky floor and arms pinned above his head, handcuffed to a rusty pipe along the bottom of a wall. 

His first thought is "fuck," and he jerks his arms roughly, ignoring the cold slice of metal handcuffs into his wrists.  His second thought is "Sherlock, Jesus Christ, Sherlock -" until he registers the warm presence all along his side, breath against his neck, and once again remembers how to breathe.  He turns his head to see Sherlock lying next to him, hands similarly cuffed above his head.  The room is only dimly lit, but he can make out Sherlock's black and swollen eye, the split lip that has long since dried (John feels the urge to burn this house - whoever's, wherever it is - to the ground, and roll in the ashes.).

"Well." John says, the events of the evening returning somewhat foggily to him.  "This is fucked up."

Sherlock huffs a silent laugh before catching his breath, a dull hitch of pain.  John feels a muscle in his jaw twitch. 

"Are you okay?  How's your head?" he asks, trying to remember exactly what happened, who got hit first. It was the bloody chip and pin terminal, he decides; he wasn't paying attention and then there was something heavy and dull trying to force its way through his skull.

"How's yours?  You're the one who had the bottle broken on you."

"I never did."

"Certain of that?"

Where Sherlock is concerned, John isn't really certain of anything.

"Where are we?" he asks, instead of responding.  Sherlock watches him for a minute more, like some weird experiment that isn't going at all how he had planned.  Even in the dim light, Sherlock's un-swollen eye is an unholy sort of grey, the colour of the world ending.  Eventually, Sherlock turns his face away, gazing up at the moldy ceiling.

"From what I could tell from the trunk of the car, somewhere in the Shaughnessy area.  If pressed, I would say 21st and Fir."

If fucking pressed – John snorts, like it could get more bloody pressing than this.

“Do I even want to know who’s responsible for this?”

“Low-level gang members.  No one to be too concerned about.  I’ve been tracking their activity for months.”

"And are these ‘low-level gang members’ coming back, you think?"

"Assuredly.  I am quite confident the police will beat them here, however.  I sent a high priority text."

"You never – wait, you have your phone?”

John can almost feel Sherlock roll his eyes.  "Don't be ridiculous.  They smashed my phone about twenty minutes before you came to. Very annoying. Luckily, it sends out a series of text messages if it is about to shut down."

"Of course it does."

"And it has a tracking chip."

Sherlock's lip has re-opened, and it makes John want to chew his own face off.

"Calm down.  Really, I'm fine," Sherlock says, tongue darting out to find the source of the bleeding.  John stares at him.  "John, seriously -"

John realizes that he can hear something grinding softly every time Sherlock takes a breath - a deep wheezing from somewhere in the vicinity of his ribs.

"Did they - " he begins, not trusting his voice, "did someone kick you?"

"A few times," Sherlock says casually, lips thin and so white.

"I think your rib - it might be -"

"Cracked, certainly.  Excellent assessment, doctor."

Sherlock's breath hitches again, and John cannot stand it.

"That fucking chip and pin terminal," John says in a rush.  "If I’d been paying attention, maybe I would have seen them before -"

"I'm sorry - the fucking what?" Sherlock's damaged mouth curls with interest.

"Chip and - and pin," he repeats absently, still ranting away in his mind.

"That is – adorable," Sherlock says, "Do another one."

"Another - what?" John manages, even though his mind has latched onto "adorable" like a starving animal and will not let it go, not ever; they’ll have to pry it from his jaws before they bury him.

"You know, it's hard to forget that you're British when you are So Very British but sometimes I forget - chip and pin - do another one."

"Um." John wants to point out that these are gang members they are in fact dealing with, that he and Sherlock could be murdered within the hour or have unspeakable things done to them, but he will say anything, literally anything, if it means Sherlock's lips don't stay pressed into that tiny injured line.

"Um - bangers and mash.  Bubble and squeak."

"Another," Sherlock sighs.

"Codswallop."

Sherlock snorts.  "You've never said that in your life."

"My gran might have."  John thinks.  "You shouldn't put this kind of pressure on me when I'm suffering from potential brain injuries.  Um - Expecto Patronum."

"What?"

"You don't - no, of course you don't - of course.  Sorry." Sherlock's empty stare is alarming. "Harry Potter.  Just making a bit of a -" 

"Popular culture, how tedious.” Sherlock shudders like he’s just said something vile, and John laughs.  He laughs and then he chokes because Sherlock's lip is still bleeding, and maybe this whole stupid conversation wasn't to distract Sherlock, maybe it was all for John, just like everything, always –

Jonh feels something shift inside him. Like a watch being repaired, suddenly steady and keeping perfect time.  Sherlock has been badly injured several times (“the nature of my employment,” he said once and John almost slugged him). Maybe John should be fine with it by now, but it strikes him at this moment how very, very not fine he is.

“If they touch you again, I will murder them,” John says, with a calm, determined sort of rage, big as the sea and as deep, full of dark things with spines and teeth.

Sherlock scoffs at him, but John means it, he does, has never meant anything more.  He will dislocate his arms and tear these pipes out of the wall; he will lift up the toilet and bring it down on their fucking heads.  He can see it all playing out behind his eyelids, and he is ready.  They will not lay a finger on Sherlock Holmes, or it will be the last thing they ever fucking do.

Sherlock must feel John trembling with rage, because he looks over at him and John looks back and their gazes hold – a long, low note of music.  That’s when it hits him, painful as a kick to the ribs or a bottle over the head, because it’s so horribly, _devastatingly_ obvious, it’s been obvious for six months now, at least six months, maybe fucking longer – 

“I’m fine,” Sherlock says.

“You’re not,” John says, at the same time that he’s choking back _oh_ and _my_ and _god,_ and the floodgates are opening, dark water and dead bodies rushing through.   His mind is flooded with images – dreams replayed in vivid colour and detail, only now the strange, dark-haired object of his affection has a clear face and long white hands and lips that taste like blood and stolen Shiraz.

“John,” Sherlock says.

“Sherlock,” John says, and for a moment he has the wild, mad thought that they will kiss, that gravity is simply going to pull his lips to Sherlock’s to punish him for some crime in a past life. His mouth opens and that’s when there’s a crash from somewhere above them, footsteps on the stairs, and of course, they’re rescued, they’re always rescued.

Sherlock’s bundled off to the hospital while John’s dragged down to the police station, where he attempts to answer questions about something that is vastly out of his depth (“No, I have no idea who they were, or what they were doing, or why I was there –”). 

He waits around for Sherlock to get out of the hospital, two days stretching by like a lifetime, and thinks that the worst thing about it, the absolute worst possible thing, is that Sherlock is so fucking brilliant he must _know_. John can’t imagine that he doesn’t know, not with the way he reads people, and if John is just realizing everything now, Sherlock’s probably seen where this was going for months. They spend all their time together, everyone probably thinks they’re shagging like rabbits, and John has had mad crushes before, but it never felt like this.

This feels awful.

It feels like the end of a clear path, the way ahead dark and overrun with brambles, and no end in sight.  Because Sherlock will never feel the same, that much is obvious – Sherlock treats John with a combination of scorn and amusement, and nowhere in any of his shuttered expressions has John ever seen a trace of ‘hopeless hidden longing.’  Equally bad is the way that Sherlock told him he basically doesn’t have sex, doesn’t think about sex, doesn’t want sex from anyone.  And worst of all is the fact that they’re friends, they see each other _all the time_ , and John couldn’t give up Sherlock any more than he could cut his own heart out of his chest.

He googles ‘asexual’ and bites down hard on the inside of his cheek.  He googles ‘homosexual’ and that pretty much takes care of the rest of his evening.

When Sherlock is finally released, two tiny stitches at the corner of his mouth, John feels the sizzling urge to reach out and touch them, gently, just to prove to himself that some things can be knit back together.

“Something on my face?” Sherlock asks, low and unamused, and John clutches his hand into a fist, forces it into his jacket pocket, and says nothing.

For a little while, he thinks that maybe, just fucking maybe, this is something he will get over. Because he’s fancied himself in love before, and it went away, or got smaller anyway.  Maybe all he has to do is hold onto something solid and weather this storm, and it will pass.  He tells himself this is the truth, but as the year ends and summer breaks golden across the city, it’s like he’s swimming deeper and deeper into murky water, and still there’s no bottom, still he stretches his fingers out into darkness and keeps swimming (pressure ringing in his ears, blood vessels bursting, down and endlessly down and down further still).

Now when Sherlock stretches out on John’s floor, John watches hatefully for the brief flash of Sherlock’s hipbones as his shirt rides up.  Now when Sherlock ridicules a crap show on Netflix for underestimating the time it would take a teenage boy to bleed out in winter, John finds himself distracted by the furious movement of Sherlock’s hands, finds himself wanting to catch one of them like a bird in a snare and press it against his mouth.

He decides, in a moment of drunken introspection, that it is something he can live with.  It is something he _has_ to live with if he wants to keep running heedlessly after Sherlock Holmes, and he does (oh god he does).

‘I can live with this,’ John tells himself, as Sherlock bites introspectively on his lower lip and John’s mouth goes stupidly dry.

John chases Sherlock Holmes across a busy intersection, jumps off a pier after him, drags his sodden body out of the ocean, and holds his useless, hopeless love outstretched in the palm of his hand, as far away from his body as he can manage.

“Had enough yet?” Sherlock asks between coughed mouthfuls of seawater, and John doesn’t say anything in response, but his answer is no, not at all, _never_.

It is something he can live with.

 *            *            *

Over the summer, Harry drinks three bottles of wine, crashes her roommate’s car into a fence and is promptly arrested.

She calls John at five in the morning, Sunday, and he and Sherlock take yet another cab to the police station.

They sit in some kind of waiting room, while the man at the front desk fills out a bunch of papers, asks John about his relationship with his sister, where she lives, whether she’s the type to skip town. Eventually, they bring Harry out: clothing rumpled, hair a mess, eyes black with tears and last night’s mascara.  John wants to put her in his backpack and carry her around with him for the rest of his life (it doesn’t occur to him that he will do just that, whether he chooses to or not.).

“Hey Johnny,” Harry says quietly, and John notices the bandages on her arms, the cuts on her forehead. 

_For fuck’s sake_ , he wants to say, to shout, to scream, _for fuck’s sake Harry what are you doing with your life, you’re so much smarter than me, smarter than everyone and you’re going to kill yourself and I’ll die before I watch this happen, I will mother-fucking die._

“You want breakfast?” he asks instead, and Harry laughs, brittle and broken sounding, but she still laughs so that’s something. Sherlock rises awkwardly behind him, and Harry approaches, sober enough to meet him for the first time.

“Sherlock, right?” she says, “Pleasure.”

Sherlock hugs her, a quick, impulsive (painfully awkward) movement, and John’s heart melts in his chest to pool at his feet.

“Let’s get some fucking French toast,” Sherlock says, and Harry wipes her hand across her eyes, and John thanks god for his best friend and the fact that his sister is still alive.

They find a greasy little diner within walking distance, and drink coffee and eat eggs and bacon (well, Harry and John eat; Sherlock mostly adds Frank’s RedHot sauce to things that do not need Frank’s RedHot sauce). John does his best to pretend that it is a totally normal, not at all traumatic morning. 

“They’ve set a court date in three months,” Harry tells them, scraping the last bit of egg from her plate and looking anywhere but John’s face, “And I can drive again after twenty-four hours – if I have a car – which I don’t.  So that’s something.”

“I should leave,” Sherlock says suddenly, and John and Harry look up in surprise. "She wants me to."

“What?”

“No, I –“

“You don’t need to hear the psychological implications of the way you eat fried eggs.  See you in fifteen, John.  Truly a pleasure, Harry, and best of luck with your alcoholism.”

John and his sister are silent.  Sherlock rises abruptly, leaving a twenty on the table before sweeping from the room, attracting the attention of more than half of the diner’s patrons.  Harry fixes John with an incredulous look.

“Does he always – is he always –”

“Yes.  Yes, always.”  John tries to keep the fondness out of his voice, but Harry still gives him a look.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” she asks, and John shakes his head, vehemently.  He hasn't had anywhere near enough French toast to have that conversation with his sister (I’m in love with my brilliant and crazy and most probably asexual best friend who would never look twice at me, Harry, help me murder myself.)

“ _No_ ,” John says, and then says it again for emphasis. "No.  Is there – is there something you want to tell me?”

Harry nods, eyes welling up with tears. John wants to reach across the table and take her hand but he contents himself with clutching his coffee cup so hard his knuckles turn white.

“The thing is,” Harry says again, “there’s a reason mum and me haven’t exactly been – talking – that much recently. It’s not like – it’s not like I haven’t – but last night was just too much and I –“

“Harry,” John says, totally lost.  “Just – just _tell_ me.  Whatever it is –“

“I’m – like – I’m gay, John.”

John doesn’t say anything.  He’s completely speechless, and it isn’t because he’s upset, and it isn’t because he’s shocked – it’s because this - _this -_ is what his mother is so worked up about, _this_ is why Harry stopped coming home for the holidays and stopped calling and _jesus christ_ –

“I’m not going to apologize or –“

“Harry, for Christ’s sake, of course I wouldn’t – I would never – it’s totally fine.  It’s one hundred percent okay.  Thank – thank you for telling me.”

Harry is staring at him with something like awe in her eyes, and John’s heart breaks for the second time in two hours. He resolves to have a long conversation with his mother (tonight, oh god) about what is and is not okay when it comes to his sister. 

“You’re my sister, you’re my friend – I love you, of course it’s okay.   Just, the other bit of it, the driving and the - God, please _please_ be careful.  Please just – stop this.”  He makes a vague and desperate gesture with his hand, trying to encompass the whole gin-scented history – passed out in the street, lost downtown, behind prison bars – oh god, Harry -

Harry is outright crying now, earning glances from fellow diners and staff and John wants to punch them all in their nosey fucking faces.

“You’re – you’re such a good brother,” Harry manages, wiping her eyes, and John thinks: _Not good enough._

When they finally leave the restaurant, Sherlock is waiting on the corner with a cab.  They take Harry back to her apartment; John goes up with her and makes sure she gets into bed, then takes ten minutes to gather up the empty cans and bottles scattered along the floor.  He leaves them all in a bin bag on the curb before he and Sherlock take the cab back to John’s dorm room.

“Did she finally come out?” Sherlock asks, soft under his breath, and John is barely surprised, just sighs the affirmative.

“About time.”

When they are safe behind locked doors, John eventually tells Sherlock all about it, lying in bed with his hands pressed to his eyes.

“The worst part,” he manages, trying to keep his voice from breaking, “the worst part is that when I got the call this morning – when I got the fucking call – I was like ‘don’t let her out.  Keep her locked the fuck up so she realizes that – that these things have consequences, that – she just can’t keep living the way she’s living or she’ll kill someone or – or herself, and I can’t handle that, I can’t – “

Sherlock is on the floor somewhere, keeping his deductions to himself for once.

“I just want her to be okay, I just want that so fucking badly, and I don’t know what to do, and I’m so, so tired, I’m –” John says, removing his hands from his face when the mattress creaks with unexpected weight.

Sherlock has climbed up beside him, and stretched out on the bed.  He is watching John, eyes beautiful and solemn, and John doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He feels his lips part, his heart stutter and restart itself.  Sherlock is a warm weight all along his side, and before he can tell himself all the hundreds of reasons this is a Very Bad Idea, he turns, tucking his face into the crook of Sherlock’s neck and squeezing his eyes closed.

“It will be okay,” Sherlock says, unconvinced, “Go to sleep.”

“Stay here,” John says drowsily, heat radiating up and down his ribs. “Just –”

Sherlock says nothing, but when John wakes up a few hours later, his window is open and Sherlock is gone.  Rain is blowing softly into John's bedroom, but the blankets beside him are still warm.

*            *            *

This is the story of the City.

Sherlock has always liked the City (capitalized in his mind because it is his only one, his first and last and only). He was born and raised there, shipped from school to school to hospital to school, and he knows the streets like he knows his blue-veined wrists, knows exactly how long the night bus from Balsam to East 2nd will take down to the minute, the second. He knows every librarian in every library (age and marital status and preferred brand of cigarette), the security men who work the night shift at the downtown high-rises, the types of flower petals that might be found underfoot in each neighbourhood come spring (apple blossom, magnolia, crab-apple, dogwood).  He can get into every high school at any time of night or day, and is owed favours from exactly two hundred and twenty-eight men and women in various professions and income brackets. 

He likes the City.

But he doesn’t love it.  He doesn’t love anything, really, except maybe his mother, and the Work, and the hard-boned cradle of his skull.

And the violin.

And a good mystery.

So maybe there are a few things he loves. But he does not love the City, not until John Hamish Watson shows up shabby and uninteresting in Biology class, wide blue eyes that have never seen the Pacific Ocean, hands that cannot distinguish the bark of a willow tree from an elm. 

“Lovely day, isn’t it?” John murmurs, the kind of comment only made by the elderly or co-workers trapped together in elevators.

It is exactly sixty-two degrees, eighty three percent humidity (Sherlock can smell the storm clouds coming from the east) and as days go – perfectly average.  Summer in the City is never unbearably hot, but the damp air is curling Sherlock’s already curly black hair, clinging like ink to the back of his neck.

John thinks it’s “lovely.”

It’s not surprising.  John is exceedingly generous; why should he be any different with regard to the weather?  He even finds something good to say about the rainy days, doesn’t complain about leaving his umbrella on the bus for the fifth time, just grins at Sherlock with grey water running down his face, clinging to his eyelashes, it is –

It is ridiculous.

The summer after Grade 11, Sherlock shows off the City like it’s something he owns or something he invented, and he watches as John smiles and exclaims and laughs like he’s having the time of his life. After awhile, Sherlock even starts to think ineffectual, exaggerated words in his own head, words like “brilliant” (grey tide rolling in, flotsam of waterlogged garbage and starfish washed up on shore) or “amazing” (crowds of inebriates clogging the downtown at midnight on a Friday, street vendors and panhandlers and students like a secret and bright new world) or “lovely” (a day that is completely average, and curling Sherlock’s hair, the haze of smog vibrating over towers of concrete).

“It is – adequate,” Sherlock manages, and John laughs (John always laughs at him, but it’s not really _at_ him, is it?  It’s around him, it’s near him, and Sherlock didn’t like that until he met John, and he didn’t like being touched, and he didn’t love a City made of cross-streets and refuse and hunger and cherry blossoms.).

Sherlock looks out his bedroom window at night (and it is a rare night that he doesn’t stay over at John’s; since the mistake that was dinner, Mother has let him do pretty much whatever he wants, as she damn well should.).

In the distance, he can see the faint shadow of mountains, jagged as scar tissue.

“Gorgeous,” he thinks, and he hears John laughing from somewhere far away, somewhere across the City that Sherlock loves.


	5. So Much Closer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for mentions of off-screen suicide and violence against cats. Jesus, that sounds grim. We're getting into the Big Mystery now my dears, so things are taking a turn for the dark and sexual-tensiony. Sorry for the infrequent updates and so much love to those who have stuck with me this far, and given me such amazing feedback. You are all the sweetest.
> 
> Come say hi on tumblr if you feel so inclined: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/mia-ugly. Or just keep being fantastic.

It is the first day of Grade 12, and there is a dead cat in the middle of the football field. 

Directly in the middle, according to Sherlock, who can read distances and measurements with the briefest glance of his slate eyes.  John, on the other hand, would rather be under a pile of blankets - it's barely gone six and rain is coming down like a fine and icy mist.  He was woken up at the godless hour by Sherlock climbing directly through his window and into his bed - wet clothes, muddy boots and all.

("Will you come?" Sherlock hisses, as if lives are on the line, and knowing Sherlock - they might well be.  John wishes he could be annoyed, wishes he could tell his friend to piss off, it's five bloody thirty in the morning.  John wishes these requests didn't stir some frisson of pleasure in his stomach, the sheer gorgeous power of being the focus of Sherlock Holmes' attentions, if only for an instant.  So of course, John will come.  He'll follow Sherlock anywhere, and hate himself for it in the morning.)

Sherlock snaps on a pair of latex gloves, and John pretends not to know what's coming next.  He's not squeamish around blood or body parts, but it's a dead cat, and who knows how long it's been there or what's crawling all over it (Sherlock probably does, John's brain supplies, but he ignores it.).

"What do you make of that?" Sherlock asks, kneeling beside the prone black body and giving it a gentle poke.

"What I don't understand is how you knew the bloody thing was here.  Do you have some sort of dead-cat radar, or something?"

"Dead-cat radar - John you are ever a delight," Sherlock says, in a tone that implies John is anything but.  "Sometimes when I can't sleep I like to patrol a bit, walk the perimeter.  You'd be amazed the kind of things that go on at high schools overnight."

Not as amazed as you might think, John does not say.  "Can we hurry this up a bit?  I'd like to be back in bed as soon as humanly possible."

Sherlock sniffs derisively, and John watches him carefully manipulate each of the cat's paws, walk his fingers up its spine as if counting off vertebrae.  Sherlock rises after this, pacing slowly around the animal, considering it from every angle.  He strides off along the field and back again while John watches stupidly, hands shoved in his pockets.  He's used to this, this - crime scene dance of Sherlock's, and he does not make suggestions, does not try to observe.  He knows that in this (and everything else, really) he's meant to be a bystander.  

Eventually, Sherlock returns and kneels beside the cat once again.  He drags his fingers through its damp fur, and then smells his glove, and John can't suppress a small shudder of disgust.  That tiny movement seems to remind Sherlock that John is, in fact, there, and Sherlock's pale eyes are on him in a predatory flash.

"How did it die, then?" Sherlock asks, and John feels the almost painful thrill that comes with being thought useful - or maybe he’s just being humoured, but it's a thrill nonetheless. Sherlock doesn't humour anyone, doesn't even try, but he smiles at John and laughs at his jokes and sometimes asks for help when he obviously doesn't need it and - focus, John, come on.

"Um." John focuses, circling the poor dead thing with its limbs splayed open on the ground.  "I dunno - doesn't look very old, so probably not age.  It's not skinny, so not starvation.  It looks - well cared for, I guess."

"Well done," Sherlock murmurs absently, and John flushes with warmth, "What else?"

"Its - well -"

"Would you like the gloves?"

"Cheers, I’m fine.  Its neck is broken, there.  Bit of a weird angle, must be how it died."

"Hmm."  Sherlock gently traces his fingers over the bones of the dead cat, and nods grimly.   He rises.  "I think we can safely assume that there is someone who will be shortly arriving at this school that does not yet realize they are missing a cat.  Breakfast?"

Sherlock pulls off his gloves with an electric snap, and John shakes his head.

"You don't want to stick around and see - I don't know - what happens when someone finds it?" He is surprised - but not disappointed.  He can't believe Sherlock could be hungry after poking at a dead animal for almost an hour, but he'd still rather be eating eggs than standing around in the rain.  

"I think the target will be revealed soon enough, and there is not nearly enough hot sauce in my life.  Unless, of course - you'd like to be back in bed as soon as humanly possible?"  Sherlock says this with a quirk of his eyebrows and it's meant to mean 'You want to have breakfast with me because you find this whole messy thing fascinating and you want to listen to me explain things you could never possibly understand while I steal your hashbrowns, God know why you want these things, but you do, John, even though you piss and moan, you love this.'

It's meant to mean those things but the quirk of Sherlock's eyebrows means something altogether different to John, who hears "back in bed as soon as humanly possible" and clenches his hands into fists just to stop them both from reaching out and grabbing. 

"John?" Sherlock interrupts, and John reels it all back in, the fine lines of his desire, hard as diamonds.

"Eggs," John manages.

Sherlock twists his mouth in a quick grimace of pleasure, and there cannot be a flush along his cheekbones, there absolutely cannot be (Sherlock is not allowed to read John's mind.  He can be many things, be brilliant and remarkable and astonishing, but he cannot be psychic or John will throw himself off a bridge.).

At Sophie’s Café, Sherlock explains himself over a plate of hot sauce (with a pinch of scrambled egg added for good measure).  

"The cat was declawed," Sherlock says, and John tries not to watch his mouth while he eats.  "Also a diabetic. It wasn't an outdoor cat, and you don't let a declawed, diabetic cat out of your home.  Because of, you know - nature.  So.  It was taken from its home, killed and left as a message.  Around - four am, I should think, by someone of a slender build, average height, who was unconcerned with being seen."

"How on earth do you figure that?"  John feels the need to call Sherlock on his bullshit from time to time, just to keep him on his toes.

"Footprints - slight indentations in the grass.  Yours, mine and someone else's, someone with a relatively short stride.  The prints were nearly gone, and while footprints certainly fade over time, these must never have been very substantial to begin with.  The lack of depth in the prints suggests an unhurried pace, so our suspect is either someone who has reason to be on the football field at all hours of the night, or - perhaps more likely - someone arrogantly convinced of their own infallibility."

"So you killed the cat, then?"

"Of course not, my stride would be much longer - oh." Sherlock blinks at him.  "John Watson, you are hilarious."

"I try."

"Try harder."

John laughs, and Sherlock looks ridiculously pleased, the way he always does when John finds something funny.  It's almost enough to make John laugh at everything his friend bloody says, but Sherlock would no doubt see the lie in it and - really, if his ego got any larger it would probably burst and kill someone.

"What's all this to you, then?  You on the case, or something?"

"I rarely find something complex enough to occupy my attention in a meaningful way - I guess we'll see.  If things become sufficiently interesting, maybe, but I rather doubt it."

John rolls his eyes, and takes a bite of his toast.  "So you're just going to wait around until someone makes an announcement on the PA, weeping about their dead cat?"

Sherlock fixes John with a flat, assessing gaze.  The corner of his mouth twitches, and he adds more hot sauce to his hot sauce.  "Something like that."

They stay at Sophie's far too long, drinking too much coffee (John's switching to decaf, Sherlock is destroying him) and barely get back to school in time for first period.  It’s Chemistry 12 with someone named Ms. Kerr, a teacher John has never previously met. The second bells have already gone by the time John and Sherlock get to class (thankfully Kerr is nowhere in sight), and the only available desks are on opposite sides of the room. Sherlock makes an expression like he’s just been stabbed, but eventually takes a seat, while John slips into the empty desk in front of  Molly, the redhead from the chem lab.  He smiles at her, and she glances briefly up from a copy of _Cinefex Magazine_ before ignoring him again.

John’s phone chimes with a text.

**Don’t waste your time; you’re not her type.  SH**

As if – as if John was –

He meets Sherlock’s gaze across the room, and mouths ‘fuck off,’ very slowly.  Molly looks up again at this, and it might be John’s imagination, but he could swear that the corner of her mouth twitches slightly. 

“I’m John, by the way,” he says, trying to keep the momentum going.  Despite Sherlock’s mad ravings, John isn’t hitting on her, he certainly isn’t. He’s just seen Sherlock treat her like wallpaper too many times to count, and feels a bit compelled to make up for it. 

“Yeah, I know who you are,” Molly says quietly, keeping her eyes on her magazine, “You’re _his_ friend.”

Sherlock’s bloody friend - sometimes, John thinks that’s all he is.

“Yeah, well.  Try not to hold it against me.”  He studies the bizarre image on the cover of _Cinefex_ , some kind of man/monster hybrid covered in long spidery appendages.  Molly must notice his disturbed expression because her mouth twitches again.

“It’s a special effects magazine. Horror films and that.”

“Oh.”

“I want to be a makeup artist.”

“Oh.”  This thankfully explains the month’s worth of lunch hours in the chem lab that Molly was mixing vials of what could only be clotted blood.  John kept his distance for weeks after that. “That’s – that’s brilliant, wow.”

**Pathetic. SH**

“Separation anxiety,” John says, rolling his eyes, and Molly laughs softly.  “Where’s this teacher at, then?”

“Oh, Ms. Kerr’s not coming,” Molly tells him. "Sorry, should have said.  She came into the class, and was crying, and then just – took off.  Lestrade was in to say she’s taking a leave.”  She pauses, narrows her eyes.  "Also, you have ketchup on your face."

"Kerr was – crying?  She just left?”

John looks back across the room, and finds Sherlock staring at something behind him.  John turns around to see a poster of a cat with glasses pinned to the bulletin board along the far wall.  "I wanted to make a chemistry joke," it reads, "but all the good ones ARGON."

John’s phone chimes.

**Interesting.  SH**

John looks back at Sherlock to find him smiling. It makes something tighten in the pit of John’s stomach; the smile is a combination of shark, tiger and insufferable genius, and he knows that whatever happens next, it will not be pretty.

*            *            *

Two weeks later, Kerr is still not back at school, and John is helping Sherlock break into her flat.

It is not pretty.

John never considered himself the criminal sort, but he supposes that – knowing Sherlock – it was only a matter of time. Certainly, some of their previous adventures haven’t technically been legal, but there’s a difference between getting caught up in illegal situations and breaking into a missing teacher’s sodding apartment. 

John is not having a panic attack.  Definitely not.

Sherlock bluffs his way through the intercom, getting an unsuspecting neighbour to buzz them in under the pretense of delivering a package.  From there it takes Sherlock all of fifty-three seconds to pick the lock on Kerr’s door, and then they’re inside.  Sherlock punches John in the shoulder as he pushes past him, and John nearly jumps a foot in the air.

Maybe just a small panic attack.

He stands in the entrance (keeping a look out, he tells himself) while Sherlock disappears in and out of various doors, scowling and muttering to himself.

 “John, relax,” Sherlock calls to him from the kitchen.  “She’s not coming back any time soon; she just bought an airline ticket to Palm Springs with her Mastercard, and the flight left four days ago.”

“You couldn’t have told me this _before_ we broke into her bloody flat?”

Sherlock immerges unconcerned and triumphant from the kitchen, waving something plastic through the air.  It takes John a moment to focus on what’s being waved, and then he ducks rapidly out of the way.

“Ha, you see?  A syringe.  She was giving the cat a daily insulin injection.”

“Look, you’re brilliant and everything, but stop pointing it at – oi, Sherlock, put it down, you’re going to hurt someone.”

“For god’s sake, it’s capped.”  Sherlock examines the syringe again. “Or it was.  Well, I’ll just put it back, shall I?”

He disappears into the kitchen again, while John sighs heavily. The disappearance of Ms. Kerr seems to have sparked some kind of frantic energy in Sherlock that refuses to be shut off. Just last night, Sherlock texted him seventeen times, and that was while he was sleeping no more than five metres away.

**It’s a simple matter of mathematics.  SH**

**When did you last cut your hair?  SH**

**Are you asleep? SH**

**Tell me all the words you know in French.  Parisian, not Quebecois.  Obviously. Obviously?  SH**

**Are you still asleep? SH**

“The question is how someone got their hands on an unwell, terribly domesticated short-haired Abyssinian in order to deposit it on the football field before daybreak?  Surely Kerr would have missed the cat if it hadn’t been there upon her return from work.  No, she most likely performed the insulin injection in the evening, more time, so that cat would have had to be –”  Sherlock returns from the kitchen, but is speaking largely to himself (specifically the palms of his fine, white hands.  John is just so much wallpaper.) “So, it’s there when she goes to sleep. The lock’s easy enough to pick, we’ve discovered that much, and the window is – John!”

Sherlock strides down the hallway toward the large bay window which overlooks  dozens of identical multi-storied flats. He pushes the curtains back, and bangs his hand once on the glass. 

“You are getting fingerprints everywhere,” John hisses at him, and Sherlock looks back to briefly roll his eyes.

“You input is invaluable as always.” He unlocks the window and pushes it open, folding nearly in half to peer at the ground below. John has a brief irrational fear that Sherlock is going to fall out and crack his skull open, can see the entire event play out in black and white and red.  His knees go a bit weak until he realizes that Sherlock has pulled himself back into the flat, and is striding purposefully toward him.

“Find anything?” John says quickly, as Sherlock looms into his personal space, reaching suddenly and shockingly into John’s coat pocket.  “Wait – what is – Sherlock –”

“Tool kit,” Sherlock tells him, waving the small black box in front of John’s face before turning back to the window. John tries to release his held breath as quietly as possible.

“Why the hell do I have your toolkit? And how did you –”

“It was putting me off balance,” Sherlock calls over his shoulder, “and you’d be surprised what I can move on and off your person without attracting your attention.  I put twenty-three stones and two handfuls of sand in each of your pockets the last time we were at the beach.  You really must be more vigilant.”

He leans out of the window again, tweezers flashing silver in his hand.  “Besides, it’s not like you’re going anywhere without me.”

John scowls at this, uncomfortable with the truth in it. 

“Do you need my help or -

“There’s something snagged on the fire escape,” Sherlock speaks over him.  “A piece of fabric or – no.  But that doesn’t – ”

He straightens up quickly, examines something in the light.  John watches as a change comes over his friend; Sherlock’s dancing eyes go dull, his lips go thin and bloodless, and he looks up at John with a completely unreadable expression on his face.

“We’ve – we’re finished here, we’re leaving,” Sherlock says, pulling the window shut and locking it. 

“Sherlock?” John asks, taking a step toward him.

 “Stay exactly where you are,” Sherlock snaps, and John freezes in place, “I don’t need you traipsing heedlessly around the house leaving even more evidence of a break-in.  You’ve been indispensable enough _guarding the door_. Tell me John, what scintillating discoveries have you made in that three foot square of carpet? God knows how I managed without you all these years."

The nastiness isn't unfamiliar, but it's still surprising.  Sherlock has stopped moving, evidently processing the words he just said.  John nods once.

“Right,” he says.  “Right.”

He unlocks the door (covering his fingertips with his sleeve, he’s not a complete idiot) and leaves, nasty hallway carpet springy beneath his footsteps.  He vaguely hears Sherlock’s hiss of, “Wait, wait –” but he ignores it. He walks to the elevator and takes it to the ground floor, hoping that he looks like the guest of a resident and not someone who just rifled through a resident’s flat.  No one seems to notice him, and he escapes into the damp air and grey day without so much as a backward glance.

Fuck him, then.

John goes home.   He does some homework – yes, he does have some, let’s not forget that while he is Sherlock’s Holmes bloody whipping boy he is also a high school student.  He does some reading, calls his mum.  Things have been a bit awkward after the “Oh my god, you asked Harry if she had _tried not to be queer_ , Mum, I can’t even – I can’t –” conversation, but his mum is trying.  Or something.  Apparently she and Harry have spoken on the phone twice now, both times with his mum apologizing and crying and Harry hanging up on her. John doesn’t know if this is a start or an ending.

He calls Harry (“Two weeks sober, trying to make it a month, and John I met someone and she is well fit, you have to meet her, her name’s Clara and she’s in a band –”) and things seem to be going all right.

He ignores twenty odd texts and three calls from Sherlock (John’s ringtone is now, to no one’s surprise, Adele’s “Turning Tables,” and he tries to change it for nearly an hour without success. Sherlock has locked his settings like a bank vault; John can’t even turn on speaker phone.).

_“So I won’t let you close enough to hurt me,_

_No, I won’t ask you –“_

John mutes the call, lets it ring to voicemail.

“Bloody Adele,” he murmurs under his breath, and Sherlock does not leave a message.

John listens to some music, and watches some youtube and thinks about going to the cafeteria for dinner.  He considers doing laundry, but reads a bit more instead, and then it’s gone nine and Sherlock bloody Holmes is trying to break down his door.

“Fuck’s sake,” John growls, rising from his bed before he’s given some sort of noise violation by Hudson.  “No window?  How the hell did you even –”

He wrenches open the door just as Sherlock is beginning another barrage of violent knocks, and John barely avoids getting punched in the face before Sherlock realizes what has happened.

He then all but falls face first into the room. John instinctively reaches out to catch him, and realizes quite quickly that Sherlock is - completely and utterly pissed.

“Jesus Christ,” John murmurs, and Sherlock tips his head back, gusting a long, lovely, gin-scented sigh.

“John Watson,” Sherlock murmurs,  “You’re alive.”

John resolves to drop Sherlock on the hard floor some time in the very near future.  Not right this second, though.

“Yeah, well done.”

“You weren’t answering – you always answer my –”

“Oh, for god’s sake.” John drops Sherlock now, but first ensures that the bed is firmly beneath him.   Sherlock hits it, bounces once, and is still. After a moment, he stretches his arms out on either side of him, a pale and intoxicated starfish.

“I needed you,” Sherlock says, weakly outraged, “And you weren’t answering – do you know how many messages I sent, it was important that you –”

“That I what, Sherlock?” John says, anger sparking hot within him.  “That I come and guard the fucking door?  That I come and leave evidence all over a bloody crime scene?”

“What? No –”

“Or what – do you just need a witness, someone to follow you around and tell you how bloody smart you are?”

“No, stop –”

John couldn’t stop if he wanted to.

“Someone you can treat like shite because after all, _they_ aren’t Sherlock Holmes, they’re stupid and ordinary and –”

“ _No_ ,” Sherlock says, climbing awkwardly off the bed, lurching across the room. “No, no, that’s not it at all.”

“Well, what then?  What do you want?” 

“Look, what happened today was – was an aberration.” Sherlock continues his stumbling approach.  “Delete it –”

“It was not, you know it wasn’t.  And it doesn’t work like that, you can’t just tell me to forget that you’re a total arse –” 

John doesn’t realize how quickly he’s backing away until he hits the door.

“No, no, that’s not –” Sherlock stumbles on John’s jacket, tossed on the floor, and nearly falls again.  John reaches out to steady him, unthinking and impulsive, and then Sherlock’s hands are on John’s shoulders and one of John’s hands is on his waist and they are pressed up against his bedroom door and oh god –

Sherlock’s looking at him strangely, and even in the dim light John can see that his pupils have gone very large. What does that mean? You see something you like, or something you don’t like?  John can’t remember, but he will google it later if his rapidly beating heart doesn’t kill him first.

“Sherlock,” he says quietly, and Sherlock seems to remember where he is, “How much have you had to drink?  Do you – do you need –”

He isn’t sure what he’s offering, but he isn’t angry anymore (angry doesn’t even begin to cover it).

“Yes,” Sherlock says quickly, and John can’t help it, he looks down at his mouth, a quick and guilty flick of his eyes but Sherlock must have noticed, he must have.

“What –” John manages, trailing off into silence, and Sherlock says, “Yes,” again, before leaning forward, a few inches at a time, like a frightened animal.

"Don't - say anything, don't - " Sherlock murmurs, almost to himself and John gasps because he knows what’s going to happen, he _knows,_ and the tip of Sherlock’s burning tongue licks briefly between John’s lips before Sherlock pulls back, trembling. 

He doesn’t go far, however, and John rests his head against the door, closes his eyes, completely overwhelmed.  He feels like _he’s_ the one who’s wasted, feels his heart hammering in his chest like a kick-drum, and it won’t slow down, he can’t slow it down.  All he can think to do is nod once, and Sherlock places one hand just lightly over John’s throat before kissing him again, a soft slow grasp of lips and tongue and John doesn’t kiss back, can’t even remember how teeth or hands or fingers work, just leans against the door as Sherlock breathes into his mouth.

When Sherlock pulls away again, it takes John a moment to recall the muscles required to lift his eyelids. 

They stare at each other.  John’s heartbeat is rattling around the room, pulse making his hands shake.  Sherlock’s mouth is swollen and very red, and he has the same slightly injured look he gets when he’s been proven wrong, when an experiment isn’t following his hypothesis. John opens his mouth to say – to say something, spill the whole sad story (Christ I love you _, I love you_ ). 

But Sherlock beats him to it.

“Three eighths of a bottle of Tanqueray,” he says, face looking a bit grey.

“What?  Um – Jesus.”

“I’ll just – I’ll just be a moment,” Sherlock says, hurrying to the sink and being promptly and violently ill.

“Jesus,” John says again.  This is getting to be a habit around the people he loves. 

“My – apologies,” Sherlock croaks before making a series of horrible, retching sounds.  John wonders if it’s the kiss that did it.   He resists clutching at the pain that spikes through his chest at the thought.

“Be right back, okay?”

Sherlock nods weakly, shoulders jerking, and John goes to the shared toilets down the hall to fill up a few glasses of water. When he gets back, Sherlock has rinsed out the sink as best he could and is crumpled beneath it. He blinks unfocused eyes as John enters and crouches down beside him.

John has imagined this night more frequently than he cares to admit.  There were lots of different lead ups – sometimes they’d be fighting, sometimes sharing the bed.  Sometimes Sherlock would have a nightmare and John would comfort him and they would kiss, kiss and fall upon each other, writhing in Sherlock’s pile of blankets.  Sometimes, yeah, alcohol was involved, or pot, but just enough to give John the courage to say what he needed to say (“You, I want _you_ , I’m mad about you, please touch me, please _oh_ –”).

In all his various fantasies, it did not end up like this.

John reaches out, brushing the damp curls off of Sherlock’s forehead.

“You’re mad, you know that?”

Sherlock nods once, leaning his face into the palm of John’s hand.  John thinks about Harry, and wonders a bit hysterically if he’s genetically drawn to the lost causes, the ones who are dark and lovely and will burn out like stars (oh, but you should have seen them when they shone, they lit up the sky, deadly and dangerous and so damned beautiful.)

“Try to drink this.”

Sherlock has a few hesitant sips of water, and curls up on his side.  The water doesn’t stay down long, and soon Sherlock’s scrambling to his feet, hunching over the sink again (John cracks a window before things get too unpleasant.)

Eventually, Sherlock has a bit more water with less disgusting consequences, and John lends him a toothbrush and gets him settled in his nest, surrounded by glasses of water that will no doubt be knocked over at some point in the night.  He turns out the lights and listens to Sherlock's breathing for a while, until the breathing hitches and someone warm and reeking of gin is climbing into bed next to him.

“Floor’s too hard,” Sherlock murmurs, and John waits a moment, masochistic until the very end, before pulling back his comforter and letting Sherlock burrow inside.

A line of music runs through John’s head (“ _I need you so much closer_ " - his sister's bloody hipster music) and he bites down on his tongue until he tastes blood.

He closes his eyes and tries to sleep, but when he gives in and looks at Sherlock’s face one final time, he finds his friend’s eyes are clear and wide open.

“John,” Sherlock whispers, like they’re children at a sleepover, sharing secrets in the dark.

“Sherlock,” John whispers back, and it’s the only word he knows.

“I’m – I’m sorry.”

John nods once, throat very tight, and Sherlock closes his eyes.  He seems to fall asleep nearly instantly, body going heavy and hot, breath turning even.

John stares at him in the darkness. He doesn’t even pretend not to, feels rather drunk and greedy about it, soaking up the fine features and gorgeous skin he has to admire covertly in the daylight.  He can hear traffic from the streets outside, and Sherlock’s quiet breathing in his ear, and feels the black woods and sharp brambles closing in around him.

Wasn’t he made of wood, once, no beating heart, no gasping mouth?  What happened to him?

Sherlock kissed him.  John has been kissed.

“I’m not,” he says quietly.  “Not sorry,” he clarifies, for the no one that is listening to him.

Sherlock, thankfully, does not wake up.

In the morning, John opens his eyes to find Sherlock watching him. 

“I’m in your bed,” Sherlock says quietly, and the events of last night hit John like a car( _kissed, kissed, kissed,_ John’s brain supplies) not to mention the fact that he’s curled up beside the object of over six months’ frustrated longing and he’s hard enough to pound nails and if Sherlock tells him the whole thing was a bloody experiment John will punch him and burst into tears and move back to England that evening.

“Yeah.  You – you weren’t.  Last night.” John tries to piece together the puzzle of the last twelve hours.

Sherlock sniffs delicately, and curls his lip. Faintly, John can hear the sound of rain falling – a vast, grey mist over a vast, grey city.

Sherlock sits up, shifting his eyes like he’s ashamed, and John begs _oh please oh please no_ , pleading with a God he doesn’t believe in, hasn’t believed in since six years old when his kitten was hit by a trolley and Father Jeffries told him it wouldn’t go to heaven.

(“It doesn’t have a soul, you see,” Jeffries says, smiling benevolently, patting his hand, and John starts to cry, great wailing sobs spilling out of him, “But I loved her, I loved her,” and his parents take him home rather quickly after that.)

“So, John,” Sherlock says.

“About last night,” Sherlock says.

John cuts him off quickly.  “Well, of course, I mean, that was a lot of gin, I never touch the stuff, you don’t have to explain it, I mean, I understand.” He can’t seem to stop, an uncontrollable rush of words and commas.

“So whatever I might have said, I feel I must – apologize,” Sherlock finishes, heedless of John babbling, and for the space of a good three seconds John doesn’t really hear him.

“Whatever you might have – said,” John repeats dumbly, and Sherlock nods.

“Yes, we – we had a fight.  Didn’t we?” Sherlock frowns at him, looking confused for the first time that John can remember.  It is frankly – terrifying, more terrifying than the words coming out of Sherlock’s mouth.  “We argued, I remember that much.  Or at least – I remember fighting with you at Kerr’s and then you left and I drank too much and came here and we argued and –”

Sherlock suddenly stops, eyes widening is horror, and John waits for the rest of the evening to unfold, grasping hands and lips softer than John had imagined (and he had imagined them, Christ, he had imagined them in great, astonishing, shameful detail.)

“Oh god,” Sherlock murmurs.

“Sherlock, I –”

“I vomited.  In your sink.  Three – four times.” Sherlock covers his mouth with his hand, eyes still wide. “John, I’m – oh god.”

He doesn’t remember, John thinks, half-hysterically. He doesn't - he doesn’t remember.

“It’s fine,” John manages, and his voice only breaks once, “It’s  - nothing.”

Nothing at all.

His hands shake as he gets out of bed, doing his utmost to keep his back to Sherlock as he gathers a handful of clothing and heads straight for the shower.  The bathroom is thankfully unoccupied (it’s still rather early) and John stares at himself in the mirror and wills his heart back together.

He is the son of a soldier.

“John Watson,” he says, quietly but aloud, “Get over this.”

He nods once at his reflection.

When he returns to his room, scrubbed and dressed and feeling slightly more under control (heartbreak levels stasis) he fully expects Sherlock to be gone.  He is prepared to consider the events of last night a terrible dream, and the events of this morning an idiocy-based hallucination – but Sherlock is not gone.

Instead, he is still in bed, John’s laptop opened across his knees.  When John comes in, Sherlock doesn’t even look up, just raises an elegant eyebrow.

“Do you know Victor Trevor?” he asks, and John self-consciously begins to towel off his hair.  “At our school.  A junior.”

“No, can’t say that I –”

“Suicide.  Last night.  It’s all over facebook.  Also, you should really insist they buy you a new mattress; you’ll have lumbago before you’re thirty five.” 

Sherlock doesn’t take his eyes from the screen, and John stands frozen, towel still in hand.  Victor Trevor.  Was the name familiar?  Should it be? Oh god, why would a kid in Grade 11 kill himself, that’s terrible, just – 

“Well, suicide is what they’re _calling_ it.” Sherlock’s eyes flutter to John’s for a moment before returning to the computer screen.  “Brilliant, another friend request.”

John hisses a breath of disapproval. Sherlock ignores him, and just like that – the kiss has been forgotten and a boy is dead and they’re on the bloody case.

*            *            *

This is the story of the kiss.

Sherlock has been kissed a total of two times in his seventeen years (if one doesn’t count proprietary pecks on cheeks from his mother or assorted elderly relatives – and even if one does, it would probably only increase the count to eight or nine, maximum).

The first time he was in Grade 10, and had just conclusively proven that Irene Adler was responsible for copying and selling a set of master keys to the school.  Lestrade was on leave, however, and Vice-Principal Gregson was never Sherlock’s biggest fan and basically lived and slept in Adler’s back pocket, so nothing was accomplished _as usual_. Adler punched him on the shoulder, and Sherlock called her a whole host of despicable names, and then they lay on the grass in the park by his house, listening to sirens and passing a joint back and forth and barely speaking to one another.

Then Irene rolled onto her elbow and leaned over and kissed him.

She tasted like cigarettes and marijuana and thinly-veiled contempt, and Sherlock pulled away from her before she could do more than lick her tongue across the seal of his closed mouth.

(“Gets your first kiss out of the way, then,” Irene says, rolling onto her back and smirking up at the sky.  Sherlock doesn’t bother to deny it. He doesn’t feel different, doesn’t feel much of anything, really.   That night there are lipstick marks on his blog and his ringtone is some breathy female gasp of obscenity, and it takes him all of ten minutes to set everything back to rights.)

The second time, he is drunk.

The day is a disaster.  It does not start out that way; no, it initially starts quite promisingly - Sherlock wakes to the sound of John sighing softly and has breakfast with him in the school cafeteria, and makes him laugh until he almost chokes by deducing the sordid sexual habits of their lunch-lady. Then after the dullness of school (deleted) there's the glorious matter of the break in. Someone killed that cat to send Kerr a message, that much is clear from the disgusting mess of photos and porcelain cat ornaments in her (frankly) depressing apartment.  And Kerr has left town, so the message must have hit its mark.  Sherlock could crow with triumph - the pieces are coming together, assembling themselves together like so many shards of Royal Albert china.  All he needs is a suspect and he already has a few; Kerr flunked more than one senior with anger issues in the previous year and the idiot even left a piece of their jacket caught on the fire escape, it's only a matter of time before Sherlock can find -

Except it's not a piece of a jacket. It isn't.  It's a small square of fabric, cut neatly from a polyester-wool blend sweater (parakeet green, a hideous colour that does nothing for John's complexion, a hideous material that must feel like sandpaper against the skin.)  Sherlock has an envelope of similar pieces locked in his desk drawer at home - at least he thought he did.  He spends so little time in his room lately that anyone could probably come in undetected - it's a simple matter of scaling the wall, a matter of angles. And with the sufficient tools, any lock can be picked.

Sherlock does not tell John what he finds on the fire escape.  It is only too easy to follow the path to its logical conclusion, and the conclusion is this: someone knew he would come to Kerr's house, and someone left something there for him to find.   He should be excited about it, really, because when has anyone ever predicted his movements, when has anyone deduced _him?_ He should be thrilled by the knowledge of an equal out there (or at least a distant second) but for some reason all he can think about is the sound of his scissors cutting through the fabric of John's sweater, all alone in his room that winter break. All he can see is the way the collar of that sweater rubs against John's honey-coloured skin, too tight and leaving abrasion marks when he finally peels it off. 

 So of course, Sherlock takes his anxiety out on John - that’s what John is there for after all - but for some reason today is not the day to call attention to John’s frankly appalling notion of crime scene etiquette. John leaves, and he does not answer Sherlock’s calls, and he does not answer Sherlock’s texts. When Sherlock rifles through his desk drawer and finds all of the sweater samples missing (even that mustard one, a particular favourite of his) he decides he has no choice but to steal his mother’s gin and drinks three-eighths of it.   The details are moving too fast, the wide variety of ways in which John Watson might be hurt (his weak leg, his small hands, his left iris with the fleck of amber just above the pupil), and Sherlock will claw his eyes out if anything, _anything_ – no, gin is the only option, the sensible choice.

He waits an hour before he takes the bus to John’s dormitory, and Sherlock is not prone to exaggeration, but the hour feels like eighteen hundred years, and when he gets into John’s room, he finds that John is miraculously – alive.

Alive and beautiful and _angry_ (Sherlock had not expected that) and Sherlock barely knows what he is doing, barely being the key word, because he _knows_ , on some intrinsic, cellular level, he knows. He wants inside John, inside his bones and his marrow, but he settles on John’s mouth because that is normal, that is fine.  Sherlock can’t crawl inside John’s liver, roll around in the acids of his stomach (it isn’t allowed, bit Not Good) but he _can_ taste the back of John’s throat, so he clutches and licks until the spinning is too much for him to stay upright.

He doesn’t have complete control and when he pulls back (the distance rising like a tide between them, too much, too fucking much) he realizes it wasn’t about anatomy; it was a kiss.

John is looking at him like he’s about to say something, and Sherlock understands cause and reaction, knows the contents of this speech like he’s rehearsed it in his mind at night when he can’t sleep (“Sherlock, I’m not – we’re friends, I don’t – this isn’t –”) and a great bottomless _no, no_ wells out of Sherlock’s body, breaks like sweat from his pores and blood from his mouth.

He barely makes it to the sink, and it’s as much John Watson’s fault as it is London's Dry Gin. 

The next morning, when John – good, honest, resolute John, John who would never look at his friend and want to dissect him – peers at Sherlock with troubled blue eyes, Sherlock considers alcohol and hypnagogic hallucinations and if John even thinks about ‘letting him down gently’ he will put his hand through the window.

So he lies. 

He is an excellent liar, as it turns out. Usually, he doesn’t see the point, wields the ugly truth like a broken pool cue on those less intelligent specimens of humanity. 

But today, to his best friend, he lies.

It’s a bit disappointing that John believes him so easily.  Sherlock puts it all down to his uncanny acting abilities (it’s all mathematics, really).

As it is, there are other things that quickly require his attention, so Sherlock can stop replaying the kiss over and over again from different angles in his head (a preliminary scan of Victor Trevor’s facebook page reveals few suicidal tendencies, although a rather bizarre obsession with something called lolcats).  Something is off, that much is obvious, and it’s been awhile since Sherlock’s had a proper murder to investigate.  He would be thrilled about it if John would just stop looking at him with that small crease between his eyebrows and an expression that does irrational things to Sherlock’s chest (but there isn’t time for that, not now).

It isn’t until he gets home later in the day that he touches his mouth and takes his pulse and wonders what the hell it all means: the kiss, the lie, all this heart-related imagery racing through his overlarge skull.  He is a detective and this is a mystery; he should be able to puzzle an answer out well enough, so he strips the newspaper clippings from his bedroom wall and sets to work with a piece of charcoal.

When he finishes, his hands are black and there is a fine layer of dust on the tops of his white socks.

There is also a Venn diagram composed of thirty-six spheres of various circumferences, and at the centre of it all is the name _John Hamish Watson._

Sherlock sits on the floor, staring up at it in horror because it doesn’t make sense, none of it makes sense, and if John Venn is deserting him, then god knows what’s next, it can’t – he can’t –

Sherlock rises to his knees, marks a tiny charcoal heart beside John’s name. 

He sits back down.

After a moment, he touches his lips again with just the tips of his black fingers (his mouth tastes like chalk and ashes and John Watson’s throat).

Sherlock scowls and scrubs the heart away with his knuckles.  There’s a flaw in his calculations, there has to be, and he cleans off the rest of the wall with a collared Armani shirt he finds under the bed. 

There are cases that require more urgent attention. The end.

*            *            *

"There's been another suicide," Sherlock says, appearing unexpectedly in John's doorway at the end of October. "Also we're going to a dance. I don't suppose you have a Halloween costume at the ready, but something unremarkable will also suffice, and I'm certain you have that in excess."

There's too much to process in that speech, and John finds himself fixated on 'dance' before the 'suicide' makes an impact.

"Wait, what?  Who -"

"No one you knew.  Senior from Albert Collegiate, over the weekend. They've just released the information; of course, my sources informed me days ago, so -"

"Sherlock, your - Jesus, that's awful."

"Well." Sherlock shrugs, and John realizes that his friend is abnormally sparkly for a Tuesday night.

"Are you wearing - fucking - _body glitter_?"

"It was necessary." Sherlock pushes past him, green and gold shimmering on his cheekbones.  "Now get changed.  The dance started half an hour ago."

"Thanks for the invite, but no.  I've got an English paper due tomorrow, and I'm not even close -"

Sherlock opens John's chest of drawers, pulling out the first item of clothing he finds. "Here, black t-shirt, unremarkable."

"Stop - get out of my drawers." John snatches the shirt from Sherlock's hands, and his friend collapses on his bed, sighing dramatically and leaving glitter everywhere.  "And you look like a bloody - mermaid or something.  A sparkly vampire."  He does not say how the glitter makes Sherlock's grey eyes look green, green and so wide and impossibly lovely - fuck's sake, John.

"Vampires don't sparkle," Sherlock says absently, grabbing John's laptop from his nightstand. "You'll have to change quickly.  I can't afford to miss anything."

"And I told you, I'm not going, I've got a paper -"

"Finished it yesterday.  It's in your inbox."  Sherlock peers up over the edge of the computer.  "You might want to do something with your hair, too, it's a bit -"

John stares at him in horror.  "You wrote my - you wrote my paper."

"Yes, and it's much better than whatever the hell you've got started here," Sherlock gestures to the screen, and John crosses the room to rip the laptop from Sherlock's hands before he starts looking at - god knows what - "I mean, seriously, a class analysis without any mention of gender - not to mention the author's politics -"

"Okay, fucking - yes, you're brilliant, we're all aware." John closes his laptop, depositing it on top of his dresser in the hopes that even a slight raise in height will remove it from Sherlock's line of immediate sight.  Fuck, the last thing John wants to do is go to some dance full of thirteen year olds and watch his friend do - do what, exactly?  John tries to imagine Sherlock dancing, and his mind veers away from the idea like light bouncing off a mirror.  After a moment, he realizes he is just standing by his dresser, staring into space.

"Black t-shirt," Sherlock suggests helpfully.

"Fuck off," John tells him, but turns his back to change (an impulsive gesture that he immediately regrets, because what the hell is Sherlock going to make of it, oh jesus jesus christ).  He pulls the black t-shirt over his head, and tries to ignore the weight of grey-green-mermaid-sparkling eyes that leaves goosebumps all up his spine and over his shoulder blades.  He tries to ignore it, but is completely and hideously unsuccessful.

The dance is at Queen Alexandria Secondary, a thirty-minute ride across town.  The bus is crammed with kids about their age (all right, a bit younger) who seem to be heading to the same place.  John is surprised that a bloody high school dance could merit this much attention - or at least he would be, if he wasn't so distracted by Sherlock's knee pressed against his own in the narrow seat.  Sherlock doesn't speak the whole way there, and John doesn't know where to look, or where to put his hands (christ, even his leg is starting to hurt), and he wonders briefly if anything could be worse than this, could make him feel this out of control in his too-tight skin.

Lights are shining out of the wide front doors of Alexandria, and Sherlock touches his arm briefly as they exit the bus.  John turns to look at him, ignoring the flood of teenagers on either side of them, and Sherlock's eyes are so intent that John feels the skin of his face burning away.  He starts to speak, but Sherlock silences him with a jerk of his head.

"It would be for the best if we were not seen together," he says quietly, and then is gone, following the rest of the students into the school.  John stands, frozen, for a moment, before staring after Sherlock with an open mouth and a rising sense of outrage.

Jesus Christ, what the hell is John even doing here?  Can't be seen together - this is just so completely and utterly predictable and there John was staring at his mouth like some sappy - Sherlock's mouth for god's sake -

"Do you go here?" someone asks him, and John turns his head to see a tallish red-headed girl coming up the pavement.

John wills the furious heat from his face.  "No, sorry."

"Fucking shit," the girl says, with such vehemence that John feels the urge to laugh. "Sorry - I'm supposed to meet someone, and I thought - I don't have their number, and I thought if you went here you might know who they were or - I don't know.  You could tell them I’m not feeling it tonight but – whatever.  I don’t know. Shit.”

"Ah."  Sherlock has disappeared into the school, and John shakes his head.  "Well.  Sorry I can't help you."

"Are you from England?" the girl asks, like everyone always does after he's spoken more than a word to them.

"Yep," John says tightly.

"That's cool.  Are you - waiting for someone?"

"I'm not - I'm really, really not.  Just got ditched, actually.  So - good times all around."

The girl laughs at how bitter he sounds, and it's her laugh that charms him - low and slightly embarrassed, and John finds himself helplessly smiling back at her.

"I'm Sara," she says, and nods her head toward the school, "Do you wanna - ?"

John could live without spending a night avoiding Sherlock in a gym full of strangers, but if he's playing the odds, the evening will no doubt end with Sherlock needing some sort of assistance, and John would rather be there to provide it than take a taxi to the hospital at three in the morning. 

He shrugs, and Sara laughs again, and they follow the crowd into the school.

He gets his hand stamped and checks his coat, and somewhere along the line Sara disappears off with a group of girls, all murmuring intently to each other.  Which is fine, it really is; John has already resigned himself to being the creepy guy who sits on the bleachers for most of the night.  He navigates the darkness of the gym, the flashing strobe lights and terrible music, the crush of Grade Nines who are basically having sex on the dance floor.  Eventually, John finds a place by the speakers where he can lean against the wall and hopefully remain unnoticed.  He scans the floor for Sherlock but sees no sign of him.  Some skinny brunette who has obviously mistaken him for someone else approaches, giggling.  She has a thin pink streak in her hair, and she says "Hi," in a weird high-pitched voice before realizing that she doesn't know him, and backing away, still giggling.   John sighs, letting the bass vibrations run up his arms and back as the middle-aged DJ starts spinning Rihanna, and that's when John sees him.

Sherlock is in the middle of a pack of bodies, dancing with his arms over his head.  He's wearing a miniscule white t-shirt, and skinny jeans, and even one of those neon glowing necklaces. There's glitter all down his neck, and John's anger turns to handfuls of dust, oh jesus oh god.  Sherlock looks like some random club kid, blissed out on the music (and other less legal substances) but John can't look away from him, feels his mouth physically start to water at how bloody gorgeous his awful best friend is.  And John knew this before, okay, he's known it for a long fucking time, but nothing could have prepared him for this. 

Sherlock.  Dancing.

_"Yellow diamonds in the light, now we're standing side by side..."_ Rihanna sings, and John watches Sherlock tip his head back and close his eyes and wants to be each fleck of glitter on his skin. 

_"We found love in a hopeless place,"_ says Rihanna, and John agrees.

"What's up, England?"

Sara materializes at his side, shouting to be heard over the music.

"How'd you know my name?" John asks in mock surprise, and Sara laughs.  She hands him a can of soda and clinks her own against it.

"Lucky guess.  It was either that or Harry Potter," she says, leaning closer to him. "What is it actually?"

"John," John shouts back, "Um - thanks for, for the -"

Sara digs through her purse and casually removes a small silver flask, which she tips into both of their coke cans.

"Trying to get me pissed?" John asks, and Sara winks at him and _a girl is flirting with me_ John thinks, half dazed and half hysterical.  He looks out over the crowd again, but Sherlock has vanished somewhere in the writhing bodies. That makes it easier, somehow, not to have to look at him. 

"What school do you go to?" Sara asks.

"Tupper."

"What?" Sara leans even closer, tucking her hair behind her ear.

"Tupper!" John shouts, and Sara makes a face.

"That school is fucking huge.  It must feel like - going to work everyday, or something," she says, "I go to Father Cochin, Catholic school."

"You have to wear the ties and the plaid skirts and all that?"

"Wouldn't you like to know," Sara tells him, and John laughs and hopes that she doesn't notice him blushing. "I'll leave it all up to your pervy imagination."

"Terrible idea."  John takes a swig of his pop (and whisky? vodka? poison?) and only winces slightly.  "So did you find your friend, or whatever?"

"Yeah, it's been dealt with. Just some douchebag guy that - well, it doesn't matter.  It's over anyway, and this DJ is so young and hip and relevant."

"Thought you just weren't feeling a dance tonight?"

Sara laughs for no reason, and studies the drink in her hand.  "Things got - more interesting, I guess.  Wait, you aren't like in Grade Nine or anything are you?"

"Ta very much - no, I'm a Senior.  I mean, would a Grade Nine have this kind of chiselled jawline?" The liquor, whatever it is, is already going to John's head, making him feel flushed and warm and more confident than usual.

"Stubble and everything, wow."

"You wanna dance?" a low voice asks him out of nowhere, and both John and Sara look up to see Sherlock, swaying like a drug trip into their personal space.  John feels the room spin dizzily beneath his feet, and Sherlock has a damp patch of sweat on his t-shirt, over his breastbone (John wants to put his mouth there, just there over that patch of moisture.).

"Me?" Sara asks, voice squeaking.

"Him," Sherlock says, eyes boring holes through John's chest, and pretty much lighting up the room

"No thanks.  I'm good here," John says quickly (how fucking dare he?) and Sherlock nods in his glittery, spaced out way.  He goes back to the dance floor, staring at his hands as they wave above his head.  Either he's on copious amounts of ecstasy, which is more than a bit not good, or he's a brilliant actor (or he's fucking both and that's the scariest thing John's ever even thought of).

"Oh shit." Sara looks from John to Sherlock and back again.  "I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were - "

"What?" John doesn't get it, and then he gets it, and he certainly isn't about to go into the fine lines of 'mostly straight, but hopelessly fucking mad for my best friend" so he just sputters, "No!  Wait, no.  I'm not.  No."

Sara is giving him a weird, assessing look and John feels the unfortunate urge to keep speaking.  "Not that it would be a big deal if I was - or if you were - or whatever, just I'm not."  He pauses.  "We are - we are talking about the same thing here?"

"I have no idea," Sara says, and then smiles.  "This is about you being a fantastic lover?”

"Yes.  Totally not, and that’s okay."

Sara laughs, she laughs easily and often, and John hasn't had this kind of effect on a girl in - well - ever.  It must be the accent, he thinks; his mates back home were always telling him it would pull American girls, and he hadn't believed them. 

"Just didn't want to think that I had wasted all my best lines," she says, tilting her head back as she drinks.

"Those were your best lines, hey?  The whole Harry Potter bit?  That's - that's really depressing."

"Like your game was so hot.  'Ta very much,'" Sara raises her voice up an octave, and John knows his bloody English mates were complete idiots, all of them.  The accent only works if you don't talk like your gran.

Across the gym Sherlock materializes again, except this time he's talking to someone.  A bloke about John's age but a bit taller, though not as tall as Sherlock.  He's wirey, with short brown hair, and he's wearing jeans and a leather jacket that scream money in honeyed Italian accents.  He and Sherlock are standing up against the wall on the other side of the gym, and they aren't looking at each other or even standing that close together, but every so often one of them will open his mouth and the other one will react slightly.  The shorter kid is smiling in a slightly bizarre, manic sort of way, and John wonders how worried he should be.  Something doesn't look right, Sherlock's never that stiff, that uncertain, and John forgets about Sara for a moment, forgets about her laugh and smile and the freckles on her nose and forehead, forgets math and physics and football, everything else but Sherlock Holmes.

"You okay?" Sara asks, and John forces his gaze away.

"This is going to sound really weird, but I think I have to go."

"Oh." Sara's face falls.  "Cool."

"I don't want to, I really don't, but I think that - " John takes a deep breath.  He thinks about the mad sparkles on Sherlock’s cheekbones, thinks about a summer spent staring at his friend’s white throat.  He thinks about a kiss that only he remembers, Sherlock's hand against his neck, pinning him to the door like a butterfly. He thinks about two days ago, when Sherlock threw him out of his own dorm room (“I can’t even _think_ with you in the same room – no, go, get out, you’re _completely_ unhelpful –“) 

John thinks about this, and opens his mouth. "Listen, could I give you my number?  Or you can give me yours, I didn't mean - I just thought you might not give strange blokes your number, but if you had mine, maybe you'd call me. Or something.  Since I owe you a coke and -"

"You owe me more than that," Sara says, smiling again.  "Kay, hold out your arm."

John does, gaze flickering back to Sherlock and his odd new friend.  Sara takes a sharpie out of her purse, writing huge numbers down the length of John's forearm.

"There," she says, satisfied with her work, ‘SARA 604-928-2876’ in thick black ink.

"Hard to lose."

"That was the plan."

"I wouldn't have lost it," John says, with more feeling than he necessarily intends.  Sara looks shyly pleased.

"See you around, England."

"Definitely."  John grins at her.  "And definitely the last time you're allowed to call me that."

"I guess we’ll see."

He turns away from her then, heading through the dancers while still trying to keep his eye on Sherlock, certain that if he so much as blinks Sherlock will be gone again.  John still doesn't like the look on Sherlock's face, uncomfortable and furious all at once, and by the time he actually gets across the floor he’s ready to kick in some teeth, or whatever it takes, just to get Sherlock back to his haughty, brilliant, obnoxious self again.

“There a problem here?” John asks, crossing his arms.

Sherlock’s eyes go wide and shocked (and angry), but John ignores him for the moment.  He keeps his gaze on the skinny, short bloke, his smile twitching with anxious amusement.

“Who is this?” he asks, all exaggerated interested. “I didn’t know you brought a friend.”

“We were just leaving,” Sherlock says, striding forward and grabbing John’s arm. 

“Hey,” John protests, but Sherlock is intent on bodily dragging him from the gym, and they’re at the bus stop before Sherlock finally takes a breath, spine curving like a bow, running his hands through his hair.

“Sherlock, wait – what’s – are you okay?”

“It’s fine,” Sherlock says tightly, but he is swaying and shaking a bit, and John puts his hands on his shoulders, holding him steady.  Sherlock sighs before slumping forward to rest his head on John’s shoulder, and the smell of skin and sweat and strange, posh shampoo makes John light-headed.

“What the – the hell is on your arm?” Sherlock says, pulling away and digging pale fingers into John’s forearm.

“Okay, ouch, not good,” John pulls his arm away.

“Sara, who is – ah.  The girl.  Well, far be it from me to keep you from you admirers.” Sherlock’s face is flushed, and he’s obviously just getting angry to distract himself from – whatever the fuck was going on at the dance – but John isn’t having it.  “If you’ve got more important things to do, then - by all means –”

“Sherlock, Jesus.”

“No, I would hate to think I was getting in the way of your social life,” Sherlock spits and turns away, walking down the street as if anyone believes he’s going to walk home.  John hurries after him, annoyance ringing red-hot in his ears.

“Just calm the fuck down for one fucking –“ John grabs Sherlock’s shoulder, turns him around.  “Some girl gives me her number and suddenly we aren’t friends?”

“Oh I'm sorry - I thought you knew. Didn't Sally make it clear to you on your first goddamn day here?  I have cases, I have acquaintances, I have assistants, I have enemies and clients and opioids.  I don't have _friends_." Sherlock spits the last word as if it tastes foul in his mouth. 

He's obviously expecting this to wind John up, make him even angrier, but John only feels deflated.  He thinks of all the things he hasn't told Sherlock, the endless depths of his hopeless, crushing affection.

"Guess not," John says quietly, and Sherlock's eyes widen slightly with surprise. 

John lets go of his hold on Sherlock's shoulder, nods once.  "Night, then."

He turns away, heading back toward the bus stop, ignoring the physical pain it causes for him to walk away.  He does not turn around, and he does not see Sherlock standing stock still, rooted to the pavement like a narrow, white-barked tree. He does not see Sherlock stare after him.

He doesn't see Sherlock at school the next day, but he does get several slightly apologetic text messages, culminating in: **I just have one.  SH**

From the safety of his dorm room, John reads the message over and over and bloody over again.  He scrubs his hand over his face, follows the ghost of sharpie lettering on his arm.

**Thanks mate,** he texts Sherlock.  And then he calls Sara.


	6. All of Our Ghosts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are, giving George R.R. a run for his money in terms of time between updates. Endless bouquets of thanks to anyone who is still reading this, and who stuck with me through grad school (done like dinner by the way!) Feedback is so welcome and appreciated. You all are awesome, and now that I am free and clear of essays for the foreseeable future, I swear you won't have to wait as long for the next chapter.
> 
> Trigger warnings for referenced (off-screen) suicide, dead cats, and not the healthiest of codependent sexual-tension-filled friendships.

_February, First Year_

Nine months after the funeral, six months into John’s first semester at uni, he finds Irene Adler sitting on the steps of his apartment.  He recognizes the smell of her before he sees her – that weird, sweet tobacco she smoked in the slim space between the school and the maintenance shed.  She smelled like that the first time he saw her. 

Her black hair has been sheared off on the sides, except for long bangs that hang like crow’s wings in her face.   She has another ring in her nose, and looks as gorgeous as she ever did.  Maybe a bit more.

 “What's up, buttercup?” she says, releasing a stream of smoke from her pursed purple lips.

John feels a momentary twist of pain in his chest, a muscle spasm or a stab wound. Irene is like the Ghost of Senior Years Past, so different and the same that it could still be Grade 12, like no time has passed at all and Sherlock is within an arm’s length from him (he could just reach out, just reach out right now.).

“Irene.  Wow, um –“ John wonders if he should hug her, but finds the thought too terrifying to seriously contemplate.  He doesn't even bother to ask how she knew where he lived. “It’s really – brilliant to see you, um –"

Irene stands up so quickly that John almost takes a step back.  

"So you're in pre-med, hey? Badass.  Love the haircut, hate the mustache." She's not actually looking at him as she says it, but John's grateful for that as well.  There's something about Irene's black-eyed consideration that he still hasn't gotten over.

"It's supposed to be a beard.  I think it's getting there, it's just taking a bit."

"A bit." Irene smiles slowly. "Right."

John drags his hands across his face, feeling suddenly self-conscious about the prickle of stubble that is much too ginger for his liking.  "I hate to leave you, but I’ve got class in, like twenty minutes.  Do you want to walk with me, or are you -"

“Fucking freshman.  Really, you could skip half the term and get nineties, John, you know it.  Can’t miss one little psych lecture for coffee with a friend?”

“How did you –“

“Textbook.”

John is impressed until he realizes she is indeed referring to the textbook he has tucked under his arm.  He thinks for a wild, mad instant that Sherlock could probably have figured it all out just by the way John stood, down to the prof and the room number.

“I’m not that good,” Irene says quickly, as if she can read John’s mind.  

“I – of course, I know that.”

John hasn't spoken to anyone from Tupper since graduation, blocked the emails, deleted the texts.  For six months he's been wandering around a strange town, getting lost in all the same places.  Sometimes he thinks that if Sherlock were there, he would have the streets memorized within a few hours, would be able to read the lines of the city like the lines on John’s palm, lifeline, fateline, heartline ( _you will grow old, and have children, and love only once, and in vain)._

"Coffee?" Irene says again, and John weighs the book in his hand against the pounds of obligation around his throat.

(One hundred years ago, saying _oh god yes_ to a dark-haired stranger, the first day of John's life.)

They go to a place a few blocks away that John has never been to before; he doesn't go out much these days.  Irene - against all odds - orders a chamomile tea, and John drinks his black coffee and picks at his cuticles and tries his damnedest not to make eye contact.  Irene Adler is too bloody keen at the worst of times, and it's not like she doesn't know everything already but - but there are limits to the kind of scrutiny John can bear.

"So what have you been up to?" he asks to fill the silence.  Irene clicks her black fingernails on the rim of her teacup.

"Not much.  Working for my dad, doing some coding for a start up.  All terribly legal and ordinary." 

Irene pushes her long bangs away from her face, and John watches them slowly slide back into place, a cloud of black silk.  He wonders briefly if they're some sort of shield, wonders if Irene can look at herself in the mirror without layers of eyeliner and pounds of silver piercings - and maybe she can, maybe it's all protection against the outside world (this is a bit too close to Sherlock's territory).

"I'm sorry I haven't been - in touch or anything.  I've been pretty busy with school, just keeping my head down -"

Irene snorts, and John has to agree with her; he probably couldn't get much more pathetic.  It's all a lie and they both know it.  He hasn't been busy at all, he's been staring at the walls in his apartment, thinking about putting his head through one.

"You don't have to apologize.  We do what we need to.  And if you need to disappear - I understand.  Sometimes disappearing helps.  There's no wrong way to do - whatever this is."

"Grief, I guess." 

“But you aren't alone.  Even if you are.  And you aren’t the only one who –“ Irene sips noisily from her teacup.  “I miss him too, okay?   It wasn’t the same as what you  – ”

“Don’t,” John raises his hand, stopping her before she can put into words the thing that keeps him up all night, clutching at his chest, in physical pain. “Please.”  He doesn’t want to be here.  This is why he doesn’t talk to any of his high school acquaintances, this is why he cut fucking ties – because it always comes down to _him_ , doesn’t it, it always becomes a conversation about Sherlock fucking Holmes and the cigarette burns his absence left in the fabric of John’s life.

“I can’t –“ he begins, and stops suddenly when he hears his voice crack. “I can’t, okay?  I can’t.”

“Okay.” Irene gazes up at him, eyes wide and mahogany-coloured in the dull light of winter. 

John takes a deep breath, tries to calm the rattle of his heartbeat.  "I've seen a doctor.  A psychologist or whatever.  I'm trying but I - I still can't.  It's not you."

"Okay," Irene says again, and John swallows against the tightness in his throat, the heat behind his eyes, _John Watson don't you fucking dare -_

"You know that I - you know I -" He bites viciously at his bottom lip (just say it, say it, pull it out like a tooth).  "You know how I - felt _._ "

Irene stares suddenly down at her tea, gaze drawn like a magnet.  Her shoulders tremble just once before she nods.  She does not look at him, but John is glad for it, does not know how he could survive it if she did. 

“Okay.”  He weakly lifts _An Introduction to Modern Concepts in Psychology_.  “I should - I should probably get to class.  Maybe I can make the last half."

Irene looks up at him a bit critically, but then nods, a wince of a smile at the corner of her mouth.  She finishes her tea and rises liquidly from her chair.  If John cared at all about anything, he might envy that effortless grace, the way the whole world feels like prey when they look at her.  If he cared at all about anything, he might think that.

“You’ve got my number, so – call it, okay?  When you feel like - like you can,” Irene says quietly, staring down at him with eyes that are much too dark.  John wishes himself one hundred miles away.  

“Okay.  Yes.  Yes, definitely.”

Irene nods again, and makes a strange jerking motion with her body, almost as if she’s going to touch him or hug him (or hit him?) or something.  She settles for an abrupt slap to his shoulder ( _well done mate, good game_ sort of thing) and John is impossibly grateful.  He watches her walk away, shoelaces trailing behind her scuffed hiking boots, and feels the mad urge to chase after her.  Even after all that, watching her walk away is like a shock of cold water, because he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to call her, or if that will ever happen, or if he will ever even see her again.  

“Okay,” John says to himself, alone at the scratched coffee shop table.   

(In his mind, he sees Irene walking away through a field of green grass dotted by grey stones, and he has to dig his fingernails into his palm until the image goes away.).

(In his mind, he hears Sherlock fucking Holmes ordering another double espresso, teeth chattering against the lips John wants to bite.)

John leaves the rest of his coffee in his mug.  John leaves.

* * *

_November, Grade 12_

The headline of the local newspaper reads: "Suicide Epidemic? Families and Friends Mourn Death of Third Youth."  Sherlock tucks it, folded, under his arm as they head toward Hooper's Memorials, the quaint looking Dutch colonial/funeral parlour that has become the latest focus of Sherlock's obsessions. 

There was no body when John's dad died, but he can remember the smells, the stale hydrangeas and floor polish and percolating coffee, and this is certainly an errand Sherlock could have run by himself.  John, however, was unfortunately deemed "highly necessary," and let's be honest - he really doesn't have much else to do with his Sunday morning. 

"I still don't understand what we're doing here," John says, as the funeral home looms closer in the distance.  The pavement is slick with rain and the sky is such a dark grey it could be late evening, instead of just past ten in the morning.  

"I should think it will become readily apparent," Sherlock says idly, "We'll go in the back door, less noticeable."

John sighs, tries to ignore the flare of heat in his stomach as Sherlock turns up his collar against the wind.    

"I've got to be out of prison by four, at the latest," he says to fill the silence, though Sherlock knows this much already.

"Ah, yes.  Second dates.  Do let me know when I should start researching the most cost efficient brand of monogrammed towels."

"I can't even follow that, but sure, okay."

The first date with Sara was surprisingly fun - good movie, good conversation - and John finds himself looking forward to tonight more than he anticipated.  Even Sherlock's been oddly accepting of it all.  Of course, the two have yet to meet, but Sherlock's kept his veiled insults and platonic jealousy to a minimum, so John is rather encouraged by that.  He smiles a little to himself, and catches Sherlock watching him from the corner of his eye before quickly looking away.

They go around the back of the funeral home, and Sherlock picks the lock in a matter of moments, slipping inside like a shadow.  John follows him, uncomfortable with how comfortable breaking-and-entering has become (and that's when he hears the scream.)

He finds Sherlock in some type of laboratory, and the first thing he notices is the male body lying grey and stiff upon the slab, sheet pulled up over its armpits.  He flinches for just a second, but he's a good Catholic boy, been to his share of open caskets.  Once you get over the initial shock, most bodies look the same.  

The second thing he notices is Molly the make up artist, standing only a few feet away with her hand clutched over her mouth.

"Molly?" John says dumbly, because - what?  Is she solving mysteries here as well?

"You're not supposed to be here," Molly says, eyes blazing at Sherlock.  "Did you - how did you get in?"

"Same way as last time.  Honestly, your back door needs an alarm system.  A deadbolt at the very least."

"You said - you said that was the only time.  Sherlock, if my parents get back -"

"Wait, what is Molly doing here?" John asks, and Sherlock glances at him with disappointment.

"Molly Hooper?  Hooper's Memorials?  Try to keep up."

"Sherlock, I'm serious, you have to leave -"

"Your parents own a funeral home?  Wow, that's - that's interesting."  John doesn't know much about the funeral planning business, but it would explain where Molly's interest in effects makeup came from.

"He's in the cold room, isn't he?" Sherlock continues, hungrily eyeing a large metal door.

"Sherlock -"

"Molly, please.  Your parents won't be back for at least an hour, not until the late Mrs. Philip's funeral wraps up across town.  Why do you think I chose today to break in - and I use that term loosely since a child could have accomplished the same thing in the same amount of time.  Perhaps forty-seven seconds more."

"No." Molly shakes her head, denial her only alternative.

"The more time you take trying to put me off, the less time I'll have to examine the victim.  The _murder_ victim, Molly, I don't care what the papers said.  Do you really want an injustice of this magnitude resting on your shoulders?"

"It was a suicide." Molly shakes her head again.  "There was a note and - I've seen it, okay, I've seen what it looks like -"

"Just because someone has a rope around their neck doesn't mean the rope asphyxiated them."

Fucking hell.  This is about those suicides in the high schools.  Sherlock, his gorgeous and mad best friend, is bullying his way into a room with a dead kid's body in it.

"I don't think -"

"No, that much is obvious, and _we're wasting time_."

Molly takes a few shallow breaths, looking from John to Sherlock and back again.  John glances over at his friend's flushed profile.  He's been right about everything so far but - murder?  Really?  John feels a bit out of his depth.

"Hey, Molly, why don't you show me around?" he asks, and both Molly and Sherlock looks sharply at him.  "He can get on with whatever it is, and neither of us will have to see it.  Like it didn't even happen."

The corner of Sherlock's mouth twitches, and it is worth it, worth everything.

"I - Fine.  Fine.  Just be quick, would you?"

"Quick as a bunny," Sherlock murmurs, heading toward the cold room, or whatever he called it.  

"Don't look," John tells Molly, and they head out another set of doors, into a hallway.

"He's not supposed to do this anymore - he said it was just the one time -" Molly mutters to herself, and John winces in sympathy.  If he had a dollar for all the times he's nattered to himself about Sherlock.

"Best not think on it."

Molly takes him upstairs, shows him where they keep the coffin models, shows him the tiny chapel used for services, and the kitchen for wakes.  John keeps his hands firmly in his pockets, just in case they feel like shaking.   

"My parents and I live on the top floor," Molly tells him, "Do you - do you want to see that as well?"

John's mobile buzzes in his jacket pocket, and he checks it.

**Don't do anything stupid.  She's not interested.  SH**

"Christ's sake," John sighs.  "Sure, let's see it."

"Does he always text you this much?" Molly asks, as they climb the creaking wooden stairs, "Or is it just when you're with me?"

"He doesn't trust me with you, I guess."

"Or doesn't trust _me_ with _you_."

John ignores that last bit, and they go into Molly's bedroom.  It's decorated all in patchwork, with a surprising number of action figures lined up along the windowsill, and a dead body lying on the bed.

John flinches and Molly puts her hand on his arm.

"It's not real.  It's a dummy.  You see?"

As John gets closer, he can make out the flat rubber features and dead eyes of the model, and Molly smiles hesitantly.

"My parents have a couple of them.  They teach kids from the college funeral makeup.  I've been using it to practice."  She waves a delicate hand at her desk, where a large cosmetics palette sits beside a jar of brushes.  

"It's like art," John comments, and Molly nods.

"It is.  You wouldn't believe some of the things Mom and I have done.  I've had to recreate half a person's face, once, when the family wanted an open casket.  Or covering up stab wounds or bullet holes or huge -"

"You can stop," John says quickly, feeling a bit light-headed.  "Sorry, I'm interested, I just -"

("Probably weren't enough pieces of your dad to send back," some piece of shite goalie said to him once, trying to wind him up, and John had to be held back by his teammates or he would have ended up in prison.)  

"My dad, um - died.  Rather awfully.  I mean, not that there's a way to die that isn't awful but - it's sometimes hard to - to hear about this sort of thing.  Sorry."

"No, it's fine."  Molly's eyes are wide and blue with apology.  " _I'm_ sorry.  It's not for everyone.  I'm just so used to it, I forget sometimes."

John's mobile buzzes.

**Showing you her bedroom, is she?  SH**

"What is it?" Molly asks, as John texts him back.

**Play with your bodies, Sherlock.  JW**

"Seriously, it's like he thinks I'm trying to pull every girl I meet."

Molly laughs, sitting on the edge of her bed (pushing a rubbery leg out of the way).  John takes a seat in her desk chair.

"He's jealous," she tells him, and John shakes his head.

"No, he is - he is definitely not jealous.  Ha, no.  He wouldn't be.  He's not like that, not interested in that sort of thing, and definitely not with -"

John cuts himself off, and then wonders why the room has gone silent.  He's staring at his hands, and when he looks up, ready to crack a joke or roll his eyes ("Sherlock Holmes, right?") he realizes that Molly is staring at him.   And she looks -

\- horrified.

"He's not.  Not with -" John continues, a skipping record.

"Oh fuck," Molly says, the obscenity completely shocking on her lips.  "Oh shit. You like him."

Jesus sodding Christ.

"Of course, he's my friend, he and I are -" John stammers, trying to cover his tracks.

"You _like_ him," Molly says again, with an emphasis on all the wrong words.  "Sherlock Holmes?  Oh, John, god -"

There are two paths he could take here - one, all anger and denial, storming out of Molly's room ("For the record, if anyone out there still cares, I'm not actually gay -"), hetero and tough and everyone's favourite things.

John breathes.  He traces the corner of his mouth with his tongue. He chooses the second path.  

He says nothing, because he doesn't have to; the longer he stays silent the sadder Molly looks. 

"Oh fuck," she says again, and John laughs.  

"Yeah, it's - pretty terrible," John says, and then laughs again because he can't help himself.

He feels a bit like he might die now that the secret's out.  The cave of pressure in his chest is so intense he thinks his ribs might crack, his heart might stop.  His body is so used to this furtive, hopeless longing, it can't possibly function without the weight bearing down on him.

He feels tears blurring his vision, body on the knife's edge of hysterics, and Jesus - he barely knows Molly, what the hell was he thinking, sharing this impossible tragedy with her?   What was he thinking, what if she says something -

"He doesn't know," she tells John, and those three words are like a smack of cold water.

"Um, no - I -" John protests despite himself, because _of course_ Sherlock knows.  John's finally close to almost maybe slightly coming to terms with the shame of being wholly known and wholly unwanted.

"He doesn't.  I can tell."

"But - but he knows _everything_ about everyone, he -"

"Not when it comes to - this.  I've seen the way he - the way he looks -" John raises his eyebrows at this, Molly shrugs and blushes.  "I might have liked him too. Once."

"No," he gasps, another of those awful stabs of laughter hitting him low in his throat.

Molly nods, and then she laughs too, and John laughs back and it's - well.  Downstairs his friend is poking at a suicide victim and upstairs he's found a stranger that understands something he's never told anyone and was planning on taking to the grave (bad choice of words but still.)

"It was back in Grade 9, when I was way too young and he was just - I mean, you know what he's like.  It was a hundred years ago, before I met - anyway."

"Before you met -?" John repeats, grateful to turn the attention away from himself (and also more than a bit curious.  He can't imagine the kind of person Molly Hooper would date.  Arty, geeky sort of individual?  Or given her previous interest in Sherlock, perhaps someone a bit darker.  More dangerous.)

"My current - whatever.  Doesn't matter." Molly's blush increases by a thousand percent, and John can't deny it; she's a bit adorable.  "I'm just saying that it was a long time ago, and he knew and he was awful to me.  He's not like that with you."

John shakes his head against the hope that this is the one area where Sherlock is not completely omniscient.  

"You should tell him," Molly says unexpectedly. John's jaw almost hits the floor; he honestly can't imagine that he wouldn't keel over dead before the words were out of his mouth.

" _You_ should tell him," he rejoins when he can breathe - and then they both laugh again, laugh until John is wiping tears from his face ( _tell him_ , of course, right away) and that's when Sherlock all but kicks the door in like some sort of overprotective chaperone.  

"I'm finished, in case anyone wanted to know." He gives a cursory glance at the practice-corpse, but is evidently unsurprised.  "I vaguely recall a certain funeral parlour employee in agony over her parents coming home, but perhaps I was misled.  Perhaps given the sufficient amount of _distraction_ -" Sherlock enunciates that word with a glare in John's direction, and John rolls his eyes after his heartbeat decelerates.  

"Oh, calm down," Molly sighs.  "And get out if you're so keen on hiding from my parents.  No reason to get all snappy just because you're feeling ignored."

Sherlock is momentarily silenced by this, which is more silenced than John has ever seen him.  

"Been a pleasure Molly." John stands and heads toward the door.  "Thanks for giving me the tour."

"Yes, I'm certain the pattern on her bedspread was infinitely enlightening."

"Don't be a prat, Sherlock."

There is a sudden slam of a door, rattling the wind-up robot toys on Molly's desk.

"Molls, sweetheart!  You upstairs?"

"Shit, they're back." Molly jumps to her feet, colour draining from her face.  "You better have left everything as it was -"

"Of course I did, I'm not a fucking amateur."

"Do you think - you two couldn't - you can't climb, can you?"

Sherlock looks at John, and John feels that same half-hysterical well of laughter building in him, a depthless flare of affection.

"Can we climb?" he asks Sherlock, and Sherlock takes a few swift steps toward Molly's window. 

"It's a matter of angles, really."

Ten minutes (and one bruised shin) later, they are fleeing through the rosebushes of Hooper's Memorials.  They don't stop until they are two blocks away - no pursuers in sight, but even then Sherlock pulls him down an alleyway for good measure.  They lean against the brick wall, catching their breath, and John's so happy he thinks he must be visible from space, helplessly incandescent.  

Sherlock's grey eyes meet his and John feels his mouth quirk, the odd smile they always seem to share that acknowledges just how ridiculous their situation is, and just how brilliant.  Today, though, Sherlock seems to be searching for something in John's face, and John remembers the last time their faces were so close together, remembers a kiss that tasted like gin and poor decisions.  He scrapes his knuckles on the brick wall to snap himself out of it, the sting reminding him of who he is and what he can bear.  He pushes off the wall, away from Sherlock, before he can change his mind.

"Find anything at Molly's?"

Sherlock watches him for a moment before replying.

"It's as I suspected.  Asphyxiation, disguised as suicide.  I cannot prove anything yet, but once I have the hair samples analyzed, I suspect it will be rather straightforward."

"Hair samples?  You took - wait, someone made it look like a suicide?  Sherlock -"

"Don't look so alarmed, it's nothing I can't handle."

"Is someone - do you think all of them were -" John feels sick to his stomach, wants to lean against the brick again but doesn't trust himself to get too close.  Three people dead, three people his bloody age.  "All the suicides?"

"I suspect so, but I'll know more when I've gained access to additional hair samples.  Keep those safe will you?"

"I don't -" Skin suddenly crawling, John pats his left coat pocket, and hears a distinctive crinkle of plastic that was not there before.  "Is there a dead kid's hair in my pocket?"

"I told you to be more vigilant.  Anyone could plant anything on you, it's an unacceptable risk. And my jacket has very specific lines, the whole shape would be thrown off."

John laughs weakly, because it's so bloody typical.  "You are a vain git," he manages, "and I am so grossed out right now."

"Oh for god's sake.  It's a protein filament, there's nothing 'gross' about it. I've put worse things in your pockets."

"Don't tell me about it, it's better if I don't know."

Sherlock considers, tilting his head to the side.  "You know actually, in the interest of public health and safety, perhaps I should -"

" _Don't_ , okay?  I really don't want to hear about it."

"Fine.  Deleted.  Lunch?"

There's a shitty diner two blocks away which has amazing onion rings and week old coffee that Sherlock is oddly mad about; they've been there before, after a case, and John's been dreaming of those onion rings since.  He nods, and they head out of the alley.  Surprising no one, rain has started to fall (seriously, the West Coast). 

"That sounds absolutely brilliant.  I - oh shit, wait.  I can't."

Sherlock looks briefly startled, and John gets it; since when does he say no to anything the bastard says?

"I can't.  I've got Sara.  By the time I get home and shower and bleach everything I own -"

Sherlock rolls his eyes. 

"-it'll be time to meet her."

"Of course.  And what sort of textbook romantic plans do you have with the enviable Sara Sawyer?"

"Dunno.  We might go wander through Harper's Books, get coffees.  Textbook, I guess." John is looking forward to it in a distracted sort of way.  Sara makes him nervous, and when she laughs at his dumb jokes it feels like a victory - like he's scored the winning goal in football, wants to do a sodding cartwheel or something equally mental.  It isn't the same as - well obviously, it isn't the same but - but John's trying, he's _trying_.   It's either that or fuck everything up completely, and he can't lose this strange, slate-eyed friend of his, so he's got to grit his teeth and move forward.  Move on.  "See you in class tomorrow?"

Sherlock coughs a response, obviously put out over not getting his way.  John gives him a light smack to the shoulder as he leaves, not letting his hand linger in anything but a friendly way.  He ignores the shout of "Don't lose my hair samples!" that Sherlock throws after him, vowing to put on a jumper and never touch this coat again.  

About a block away, he glances back over his shoulder, but Sherlock isn't looking at him.  His friend is walking off in the opposite direction, polished shoes ringing on the wet concrete.  The rain picks up slightly, but Sherlock hasn't even turned his collar up, and both of them will be soaked before they reach home.  John feels the inexplicable throb of his heart in his throat, swallows around the urge to shout something after him, a "wait" or a "come back" or a "stay." 

But John's trying.  He's _trying_.

As predicted, he's soaking wet by the time he gets home.  That night, Sara kisses him once on the mouth as he walks her to her car, and laughs when his cheekbones and ears turn bright pink in surprise.  She laughs, but it doesn't feel like a victory.

* * *

_"Send my love to your new lover, treat her better..."_

John rolls over, blindly reaching for his phone.  Sherlock didn't wait long to get on that new Adele album.

_"We've gotta let go of all our ghosts..."_

"What?" John mutters, still half asleep.

"225 East 16th Avenue.  I need you immediately."

The last sentence shouldn't have such an effect on John, but he is suddenly more awake than he wants to be.

"Why are you calling instead of texting?"

"I couldn't risk you sleeping through the notification, and I'm so grateful that you're taking precious time to ask important and crucial questions -"

"Okay, okay.  Jesus." John holds the phone in place between his ear and the crook of his shoulder as he rolls out of bed, and fumbles for some pants.  "225 East -"

"16th Avenue, as I said.  Try to keep up.  And hurry.  Your hair looks fine."

John glances away from the mirror and doesn't bother asking how Sherlock knew.

"I'll get a cab.  What is this about anyway?"

"I've found Ms. Kerr," Sherlock says and hangs up.  It takes John a moment to connect the dots.  The teacher with the cat.  Whose apartment they broke into.  Fan-bloody-tastic.

John has the taxi drop him a block away from the address in case its presence might be suspicious.  He finds Sherlock hiding behind a light blue Fiat, looking much more suspicious than if he were just loitering.  When Sherlock catches sight of him, he motions frantically for John to join him.

"The airline ticket was a ruse," Sherlock says immediately.  "Meant to throw someone off the trail.  I should have suspected - and I would have, had I not been distracted.  It's no excuse, it's unforgivable.  Irene got me access to her bank records and I still missed this, _it's always something_ -"

John remembers exactly what Sherlock was distracted by the night they broke into Kerr's apartment, and restrains himself from running his fingers over his lips.  Because that was real, he's pretty certain it was real.  He's pretty sure it happened and he didn't just dream it while concussed and desperate.

"She's house-sitting," Sherlock snarls, as if the act is a personal affront.  "The house with the fiber cement siding and wireless alarm system, just there." 

"Um." John scans the row of houses in front of them.  "I don't -"

"Oh for God's sake.  Red door, then."

"Cheers."

It is a perfectly ordinary house, windows dark in the early morning.  As John watches, a light turns on inside, filtering through the crack between the curtains.

"Brilliant," Sherlock murmurs.  "Right on time."

"What's our plan here?  You've found her, now what? Are we going to break into this house next, or -"

He's cut off by the garage opening, the slow groan of gears and movement that makes John almost jump a meter with surprise.  Sherlock eyes him pityingly before striding out from behind the car, heading toward the opening garage.  Shit, he's _not_ going to break in - he's going to confront her here, in broad daylight.  John wipes his palms on his jeans and hurries after him.  

"Debra Kerr," Sherlock is calling out before the door has even stopped moving.  Inside the garage, a short grandmotherly woman is fumbling with the keys for her minivan.  She freezes at the sound of her name, and the look in her eyes has John wincing and feeling a bit awful about his life choices.

"I'm calling the police," she says, hand instantly going for her cellphone.  Her fingers are trembling too much to dial, but John still stops in his tracks.  Sherlock, of course, couldn't care bloody less, approaching Kerr like she's an injured sheep.

"We're in your chemistry class."

"I'm - I'm on a medical leave. You shouldn't be here."

"We found your cat."

Kerr says nothing, bottom lip trembling slightly.  John fights the urge to give her a hug; she and his gran could be sisters.

"You're with them, aren't you? I know you're with them, don't tell me you aren't.  I won't tell anyone, like I said.  I'm - I'm just a teacher, I don't want to be involved with that sort of thing.  Just - please leave me alone."

"What did you see?" Sherlock asks softly and Kerr flinches.

"Nothing, I saw nothing, and I won't tell anyone -

"We want to help you," John says because he can't stop himself.  He's not the best at coldly deducing seniors in distress.  

"You want to  - you." Kerr looks like she could either laugh or burst into tears.  "You're children."

"It was the chemistry lab, wasn't it?" Sherlock asks, ignoring John's addition to the conversation.  "Who was there?"

"I told you, I don't want to be involved."

"What are they making you hide?"

"Nothing.  It was nothing - it was just that - poor boy." Kerr's voice breaks on the last word, and she quickly opens the door to her car, realizing her mistake.

"Victor Trevor." Sherlock doesn't miss a beat.  "So it was illegal pharmaceuticals then, if I might hazard a guess.  Buying or selling? No, don't answer that, Victor wasn't the enterprising type.  You caught them in the transaction, they warned you away, but didn't trust you to leave it at that. The cat was a threat, and it was enough to make you want to leave the city - or at least make you think you should.  Yet even after buying a ticket to Palm Springs you're still here, house-sitting for your - niece, it would seem."

"How does he know that?" Kerr asks John.

"He's a genius," John answers simply, and Sherlock shoots him an odd look.

"I've no friends to stay with in Palm Springs," Kerr admits.  "On a teacher's salary - I had air miles enough for the ticket, but there's no way I could afford -"

"And now Victor is dead."

"I had nothing to do with that," the woman protests.  "I didn't tell his parents, didn't tell Mr. Lestrade.  He's a good boy, Victor, I knew him from church.  He made a mistake, and he begged me -"

" _Was_ a good boy.  Hanged himself, as you might recall. Or at least that's what the police are saying."

Sherlock is still convinced that the suicides were murders, a fixation bordering on obsession.  In the week since Molly's, John has seen him sleep for maybe ten hours - is up all night on the laptop and muttering to himself most of the time.  He hasn't really spoken much more about his theory and John hasn't pushed him, mostly because he's hoping that it isn't true, and they aren't suddenly investigating serial killers here.  He's done gangs and theft and drugs; murder takes it all to a new and dizzying level. 

"It wasn't to do with me.  He - the other lad ran off, and I took the pills away from Victor, and that was that.  He said it was for studying, he never told me he was - depressed or anxious or - it wasn't my fault."

"When did this happen?" John asks softly, and Kerr looks at him in shock, as if she's forgotten that he was there.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Sometime before the cat died, but not long," Sherlock answers for her.  "You were teaching summer school this year, weren't you?  And they painted the chemistry lab in July.  Late August then."

"I - I don't understand how you know all this."

"And I don't understand how you can live with the weight of a boy's death on your conscience, but here we are."

"Sherlock -" John snaps.

"Don't say that," Kerr gasps.  "You don't know what they were like! They came to my house and - my Pansy, my sweet little Pansy."

"Who came to your house?" Sherlock demands.  

"I didn't know what would happen to Victor, I thought I was protecting him -"

"Give me a name."

"Don't - don't come back here.  And don't get involved in all this.  Whatever you think, it's not safe.  The things they said - and such a soft voice -" Kerr trails off, lost in horrified memory.  She climbs into her van, but Sherlock gets in the way before she can close the driver's side door.

"I've told you everything I can, I'm not -"

"Ms. Kerr," John interrupts, keeping his voice calm and eyebrows knit together.  "I'm sorry about your cat.  She was lovely."

Kerr briefly looks away from Sherlock to John.

"Yes.  And so friendly, everyone always said."

"Anyone who would hurt an animal like that doesn't deserve protecting."  Forget Victor bloody Trevor, get her where it counts.

"Yes.  That's - that's right.  Who would do such a thing?"

John waits a beat, but the teacher says nothing else.  She puts her key in the ignition, and the weary engine groans to life.

"Let her go Sherlock.  She's been through enough."

"John-" Sherlock protests.

"No, wait," Kerr says in a rush, taking her hand off the wheel to grip the shoulder of Sherlock's coat.  "Wait."

They wait without speaking, the only sound that rumble of the engine.  The garage is probably filling up with exhaust fumes, this situation is no good for anyone.  Kerr covers her face with her other hand for a moment, before pushing Sherlock away from the car door.

"Moriarty," she says.

Then she slams the door shut, and backs down the driveway, almost flattening John in her haste to get away.  John and Sherlock stand in the driveway, watching her go.  _Moriarty_ , John thinks, and shivers inexplicably.  It's familiar for some reason, but he can't say why.

Beside him, Sherlock's face looks more pale than usual.  All that lack of sleep is not agreeing with him; the circles under his eyes are the dark purple of violets.

"You okay?" John asks, and Sherlock nods, sharply.

"What you did - that was good.  With the cat and the - I should have thought - " He doesn't finish the sentence, just stares blankly down the street.

"Moriarty, eh? You heard that name before?"

"Yes."

Sherlock says nothing more.  Eventually, John clears his throat.

"Are you going to tell me about it, or - "

"No."

"Oh." Again, Sherlock is silent, but John can see his lips moving faintly, whispering calculations and deductions under his breath.  It might have made him angry before, but now it just makes him nervous.  He wants to reach out, and push the hair off Sherlock's forehead, rake his fingernails over his friend's scalp until Sherlock purrs like a cat. 

He does not do that.  "How can I help you?" he asks instead, and Sherlock looks at him - tired and alarmed and disinterested all at once.  John hates when Sherlock looks at him that way.  It is one of the things he has grown to hate most in the world.

Sherlock says nothing, but his look says it all.  Fine - if he's in one of his moods, John can take a hint.

"I'll go home then.  Really pleased you got me out of bed for this."

Again, Sherlock says nothing, just takes out his phone and starts texting furiously.  John shakes his head (okay, he's a bit angry _now_ ) and starts walking away. 

He's been walking away from Sherlock a lot lately, and he doesn't like it.

Sherlock still climbs in his window that night, silent and stoop-shouldered and soaking wet from the rain.  John had been at his desk working on a maths assignment (in between texts from Sara), but he gives it all up as a bad job when Sherlock's teeth start chattering.  He runs down to the cafeteria for two cups of watery tea, and by the time he gets back, Sherlock is wearing one of John's dry shirts (don't think about it, don't) and sitting on his bed, buried in blankets.

His fingers are ice cold when John passes him the tea.  

"You need to get a rain coat." John sits crossed-legged next to Sherlock on the bed, leaning back against the freezing windowpane.

"I despise polyurethane." Sherlock sips his tea, lips shaking.  Then he reaches into the pocket of his trousers, and pulls out a small plastic bag full of bright pink pills.  He passes it to John. "I know who sold Victor the drugs."

"Where did you get these?  You didn't - not again -"

"Kerr still had them in a bathroom cabinet - no doubt to comfort herself that she still _could_ take action should she choose to, which undoubtedly she never would. I wasn't seen or detained so stop chewing on your bottom lip like that."

John wasn't even aware he was doing that.  He presses his lips together.

"His name is Sebastian Moran.  You met him at the dance we attended."

"I - met him? Not that bloke you were talking to -"

"Yes.  I was attempting to convince him of my trustworthiness before you so helpfully interrupted and sabotaged my efforts."

"Cheers, thanks."

"I believe I would have been able to purchase these particular pills from him if given another eight minutes, but it is not helpful to dwell on past miscalculations.  Anyway, I have a sample now, so the other is not necessary."

"And how did you find him?"

"Irene unlocked the security camera footage from the school this summer.  Sebastian did not seem to be attending any classes, but he was a near constant presence, which points in a fairly obvious direction.  I wasn't certain until this morning, when we spoke to Kerr. He was also involved in a transaction with the suicide victim from Albert." Sherlock answers the questions before John can even ask it.  "Irene again.  Don't mistake her cooperation for friendship or affection or any similar weakness.  I assure you, I will pay for this information." 

"That's scary  Okay, so this Sebastian is selling drugs that make people  - what, suffocate?"

"Asthma," Sherlock replies.  "Victor had asthma. The interaction with methylenedioxy can lead to shortness of breath that I suspect proved fatal in at least three cases that we know of.  I can tie the substance to two with reasonable certainty, and the third seems obvious at this point.  To prevent an investigation, someone made it look like suicide."

"Moriarty," John murmurs, and Sherlock frowns.

"Perhaps." He picks at a stray thread on the blanket.  "You were upset this morning.  Because I wouldn't tell you.  I thought it might be - better if you didn't know.  Plausible deniability.  Safer."

"You don't have to protect me from anything, Sherlock.  I'm not a delicate flower. I'm your friend."

"Right, yes.  It's - I forget, sometimes.  How that goes."

John's clenches his teeth against the ache in his heart, washes it down with a gulp of hot tea.

"Who's Moriarty?"

"I don't know," Sherlock admits, which is a special kind of terrifying.  "I - have been given that name before.  The identity thefts, last year.  And the weapons smuggling this summer - there was a note - and -"

"Is this maybe something the police should know about?" 

"Not yet." Sherlock must notice John's rather alarmed look, because he adds, "Soon."

John nods, and Sherlock finishes the last of his tea, helpfully balancing the mug on John's windowsill.  

"I have to go.  I'm getting these analyzed and my contact will be waiting.  I just wanted to - tell you first."

"Sherlock, it's pouring out.  At least take my umbrella, or -"

"No need." Sherlock uncurls himself from John's blankets, and slips into his wet coat.  John doesn't ask for his shirt back; it's as good as lost forever now. "Your confidence intervals for p. 489 are incorrect, but I wrote the answers in pencil.  I'll see you tomorrow, yeah?"

"You're not - um - coming back?" John doesn't know why the question makes him blush.  Sherlock always comes back, spends more time in John's room than his own.  Why does it suddenly hurt to ask this, why does it inexplicably burn in John's mouth like salt?

"No, I rather think - I may not have time." Sherlock opens the window and swings himself over the ledge in a move that makes John's stomach drop down to the floor.  He tries not to look at Sherlock's white knuckles, clutching the ledge tightly.

"Lock your door," Sherlock tells him in parting, and then begins his descent back to earth.  John doesn't like that last bit, but he gets up, flips the deadbolt in his door before he forgets.  He falls asleep sitting up in bed, cup of tea gone stone cold in his hand.  There is one text message waiting on his phone.

**the game is on.  SH**

This makes the corner of John's mouth curve slightly.  If it's a game, then they're still having fun.  If it's a game, they can still win.

The next text comes moments later.

**also I've been arrested they're going to take my cellphone call mycroft i GUESS  SH**

Yep, John thinks as he rolls out the kink in his neck and starts to throw on some clothes as quickly as possible.  The game is definitely on.  

* * *

This is the story of John and Sara’s third date.

Sherlock has had his head bashed (twice) into a brick wall, and while he is not concussed, his eyebrow is starting to bleed and he can’t really make out the numbers on his phone, and he needs John to send a series of important texts.

He dizzily scales the side of the residence, should be routine by now, but a bleeding head wound brings new and invigorating challenges to even the most mundane activities.  

John is not there.  His Chuck Taylors are also gone, as is his most conventionally stylish leather (fake) jacket, and the air smells vaguely of Burberry Sport (hints of citrus and ginger, gift from mother).

A date, then.  

John has basically no money most of the time, so there are a limited number of places he could be.  Sherlock checks John’s internet history and finds the movie tickets he purchased online (independent art house film, obviously trying to impress).  Sherlock doesn’t have anything better to do, and he needs John to – what was it he needed again?  Texts, right, that’s it.

The movie has already started, and Sherlock sits in the back row, watching John and Sara (604-928-2876) four rows ahead and two seats over.  John has done his hair, put in some ridiculous gel in the hopes of making it look less like duckling down and more like the hair of an obnoxious television personality.  Sara looks the same as she did at the dance, more or less, and she isn’t _un_ attractive, if one were into that sort of thing.  Which Sherlock is not.  Even in the flickering light, Sherlock can see her eyes move toward John again and again, and Sherlock's hands clench on the armrests of his seat because – because he – well, John doesn’t have time for this, that’s the thing, Sherlock has at least sixty-one more important things that John could be doing right now, and he lists them in his head while some alternative folk band wails out their loving accompaniment to the saccharine and well-lit action on-screen.

1\. Send three text messages for me.

2\. Stop my eyebrow from bleeding.

3\. Finish the marijuana I stole from Irene’s locker last Tuesday.

4\. Send three text messag – wait –

When the movie ends, Sherlock follows John and Sara from the theatre to the coffee shop three blocks over, an over-priced faux Italian affair that Sherlock can’t stand, but Sara seems impressed by.  He watches them through the large glass windows, passing by several times in a series of hats (twice behind a newspaper) and every time Sara is laughing and smiling and John is – well, he looks happy.  He looks – ordinary, perfectly ordinary, and Sherlock knew this much about him, he did, but it’s as if John’s proximity to Sara brings it out in that much sharper relief.  

5\. Buy me two Americanos.

6\. Go through the dumpster behind Whole Foods.

Sara laughs at something particularly amusing (knowing John, probably some outdated British colloquialism, some turn of phrase that makes him sound especially elderly) and Sherlock adds to his list.

7\. Kiss me again (just for the data, I need data, I cannot draw sufficient conclusions without further experimentation, it’s simply science, and nothing more than that.).

Before he climbs back into John’s bedroom, Sherlock hits his head once more against the brick wall of the dormitory.  It is abrasive enough to re-open his head wound, and for that, at least, he is glad.  

He has exactly three point six four minutes to arrange himself haphazardly across John’s bed before John comes bursting in the door.  He is smiling and smells like Burberry Sport and Sherlock finds the scent completely disturbing – sour and floral and fake, not like John at all.

“Oh,” John says quietly, his smile faltering just a fraction.  “Oh, hello.  What are you doing here?”

“Waiting.”

“I think it’s rather time I left you a key or something.”  John throws his jacket on the floor, toes off his shoes.   “I mean, you’re going to get in either way, at least you won’t have to scale the bloody wall every – what the fuck has happened to your face?”

Ah, yes.  Sherlock raises a hand to his swelling eye, feels the salt-hot smear of blood against his fingertips.  

“Bit of trouble.”  He sits up, blood rushing dizzily from his head.  “Nothing to worry about.”

“Bit of trouble, my arse.  If this was fucking Anderson, I will tear his fucking legs off.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes, ignoring the heat that curls through his stomach.  John is righteously indignant about the smallest things, but only ever when it comes to Sherlock.  It makes Sherlock feel even more important than he already knows he is, which is a bit bizarre, really.  He’s the smartest person in every room, and it should not take this perfectly ordinary boy’s grudging esteem to make him feel brilliant.

 “Come on, let me see.” John sits down on the bed without turning on a lamp. "I leave you alone for one night and you get arrested.  I leave you alone tonight and you get your head bashed in."

"The charges were patently ridiculous, and I'll certainly be found not criminally responsible if it ever goes to trial.  I wasn't going to tamper with evidence, I simply wanted to make use of the forensics team's equipment.  I was basically doing the public a service -"

"By breaking in to the police department.  Where, you know, _police_ are. Yeah, that was a great plan."

The moonlight ghosts through the window with long, pale fingers, and John reaches toward him.  Sherlock almost flinches, he does not like to be touched, and for the most part, no one touches him (unless it is to push him into lockers or shove him into brick walls or or or -) 

John touches his face, and Sherlock catches his breath.  It is completely  – it is not like – it is -

Just.

Overwhelming.

John tilts Sherlock’s head toward the window, hissing unhappily between his imperfect front teeth before digging into his beside table (Sherlock instantly feels the absence of John’s hands on his skin, suddenly cold where it was warm and calloused, unbearable.).

John turns back, smiling, with gauze and peroxide.  “Took a bit of – “

“First Aid,” Sherlock interrupts, “back in England, when you were still playing soccer.  Thought you’d make yourself more valuable to the team, but you were surprisingly good at it, even liked it, the sense of power –“

“Okay, shut up now.”

John presses the damp gauze to the corner of Sherlock’s eyebrow, and he feels the sting, but it is nothing ( _nothing_ ) to the sting that sparks in fine lines from the pressure of John’s other hand on his chin, holding him steady.  Sherlock wants to pin that hand in place like one of Mycroft’s butterflies, peel layer after layer away with a fine-edged scalpel, until he knows the exact reason that this palm, this exact combination of cells and blood, can burn his skin like alkaline.

John is staring at him.  Their gazes meet for an instant and hold, the moment becoming slow and charged and impossibly hot, an exothermic reaction (Sherlock’s certain his eyelashes will be burned by the sparks but he cannot look away, will not look away -)

John looks away first, and the moment is over. 

“Your head is bleeding,” he says, as if Sherlock doesn’t know.   “You should really have gone to the hospital or – something –“

“Why would - would I go to the hospital?  I’ve got you.”

John’s hands are trembling as he puts a piece of butterfly tape over the cut, and Sherlock leans (yearning) into the contact, braces himself for the inevitable and awful moment that John will be finished, and pull back, and move away.  It will be un- _fucking_ -bearable, and Sherlock knows it, and somehow knowing it makes it even worse when it finally happens.

John puts his supplies back in his nightstand, and goes to wash his hands.  Sherlock watches him, a hungry sort of panic dancing underneath his skin.  This is getting entirely out of hand.  This whole thing is intolerable.

“How was Sara?” he asks.

John looks surprised, which is disappointing.  He really has to start assuming that Sherlock knows everything; things will be easier for both of them.

“She’s – she was fine.  She’s great, actually.  She’s –” John rubs a hand through his hair, leaving it standing up at ridiculous angles.  “You know, she’s going to bring her friends out with us next time.  Not a huge crowd or anything, just a few - you should come out with us.  Maybe. Some time.”

This cannot actually be happening, not when Sherlock’s skin still smells like the palms of John’s hands.

“I’m not interested in being set up with Tess or Jessica or Rahat, and I think Marianne rather prefers girls, though she has not figured this much out yet.”

John blinks.  

"People reveal the most obvious things in their facebook profiles," Sherlocks says quickly.

“Right.  Okay.  But I’m not talking about setting you up, I’m just saying – you could make some friends, or whatever.  If you wanted."

“Not interested,” Sherlock tells him, flopping back onto John’s bed (but what he wants to say is this: I don’t need friends, and I don’t want them.  I want to drive everyone out of the room and out of my sight, I want every student and teacher in our school and in the city to hate me, absolutely and utterly, so that you will be the only one in the world who doesn’t, _the only one in the world_.) 

He doesn’t need John to tell him that this last bit might not be okay.  He is learning.  ‘Becoming socialized’, Mycroft would say, like a dog, a golden fucking retriever.

“I suppose you’re sleeping over then,” John sighs, tossing his grandma’s quilt onto the floor.

“Very good, Doctor,” Sherlock says with a wave of his hand, but he does not move from John's bed.  

John rolls his eyes, but stretches out beside Sherlock after a moment.  The two of them lie there, looking up at the ceiling, shoulders just touching ("I don't mind so much, when it's you.").  Neither of them speak, which is just as well; Sherlock wouldn't have heard anything over the throb of his head and the pound of his heart.  He closes his eyes.

"What are you going to do - you know - after?" John asks the silence.  His words hang, unanswered in the stale air.

"I don't understand."

"After graduation - I mean, we always talk about me, don't we? I was just - wondering.  It's almost December.  Have you got a uni in mind or - don't laugh at me."

"Uni?  Sorry, sorry."

Sherlock has an answer to this question, one that he has replayed so many times in his mind that he can pick out the minor details - the slow dip of John's eyelashes, twitch at the left corner of his mouth, "bit not good" clipped out through his teeth.  

He can't possibly say it out loud.

"I suppose I'll think of something," he tells John instead, and John sighs.

"That's terrifying.  Nothing?  Really?  What about like - law or something?  You'd be dead brilliant -"

"Ah yes, law, that's me all over.  Mother would be so pleased."

"Okay, fine, not law.  You can be a private detective, I guess.  Like one of those film noirs."

Sherlock snorts.  "Business as usual."

John starts to rattle off the pre-med programs he's applying to, as if Sherlock doesn't know.  As if Sherlock hasn't looked up each school in particular, and memorized the surrounding neighbourhoods and the rental averages of two bedroom apartments.  One room would probably be sufficient, really, they make do quite well in John's current living space.  But maybe John would be uncomfortable with it, the suggestion; Sherlock is pretty confident that John still considers himself straight, despite physical evidence (and web history) to the contrary.  

Sherlock bites his post-graduation plans down between his teeth, like a cyanide capsule.

"It'll be weird, leaving," John murmurs, "I mean - I know I haven't been here forever, haven't grown up here like you.  But it all feels so familiar now, I just - don't want -"  He trails off.  "You've really got no plans?  Nothing at all?"

The answer clings, acrid, at the back of Sherlock's throat. He shrugs, the movement bringing his shoulder in closer contact with John's.

"Do you want to stay here, or move somewhere else?"

"It - depends," Sherlock manages, a grain of truth at last.

"Depends on what?"

"I will go wherever you go," Sherlock does not say, does not say, "You are my plans," does not say, "I cannot think about being parted from you, not even for three days, last Christmas was unbearable."  Sherlock does not say, "I could survive anywhere, there is crime everywhere but there is only one John Watson, will you please please let me -"

"Cause I was thinking - depending on where I end up - maybe you'd - " John swallows and Sherlock feels it.  "Maybe you'd come with, or something.  Like if I get accepted here, I dunno if you want to still kip with your mum, but we could - we could rent a place or -"

"I cut up your sweaters last Christmas," Sherlock says quickly, before he can stop himself.

There is silence.

"What?" John says eventually, "Wait - why?"

"An experiment," Sherlock says, because that isn't a total lie.  It was certainly an experiment of some kind or another, and the results were - let's just say inconclusive, it's an easier word than devastating.

"Right.  Of course.  Well, I hope it was bloody enlightening."  John sounds more exasperated than angry, and Sherlock suppresses a smile.  "If we move in together, my closet is off limits."

Sherlock tries to speak, but his throat is too tight.  He does not suggest names for a dog.

"Well?" John asks, and if he's nervous about the answer, it's nearly impossible to tell. "What do you think?"

"We can - we can work out a barter system," Sherlock manages.  John laughs beside him, the vibrations moving outward like ripples on a lake, and Sherlock tells himself that this will be the last date John ever has, ever again, with Sara or anyone else, the end.

 


End file.
